Joan Peterson is in love, over and over and over again. She keeps finding herself in the same situation: in love with some man, with some obstacle keeping them apart. Every time, they overcome it, the man asks for her hand in marriage, she accepts, cue the happily ever after. And every time that's done, she finds herself in this setup again, in another time, another place, a whole other life with different people involved. As she becomes aware that she's trapped in this bizarre loop, she starts pushing back, finding ways to fight it, escape it or outmaneuver it, but it's not letting her go that easily.
Having premiered in 2022, Love Everlasting publishes monthly; so far it has been published in five-issue bursts with a few months' break in between.
Tropes
- A Day In The Lime Light: The "Just West Of Love" arc focuses on The Cowboy and his true intentions.
- Arc Number: In the "Too Hip for Love" arc, where Joan's story keeps going even after she's married, she and everyone else remember all major events in her and her husband Don's lives as happening in the year 1963: graduating college, moving in together, the births of their children, etc.
- Arc Words: "Love is everlasting", said by the Cowboy every time he kills Joan. Penny Page also repeats it a few times, saying Joan's mother always says it.
- Ambiguously Gay: In issue #10, Joan's adult son Timmy comes back after spending five years in the Navy and moves in with another sailor he served with. They seem very close for just roommates when Joan has dinner with them later, but the story doesn't state outright that they were in a relationship.
- Awful Wedded Life: In issue #3, "Too Late For Love!", Joan's parents Bill and Pattie despise each other, constantly fighting at each other to the point where she’s fed up. It’s revealed that Bill settled for her after the real Joan Peterson rejected him in an attempt to break out of her cycle of romances. Pattie resented him for it, especially when their daughter was named after and resembled his ex.
- Big Bad: According to issue #5, Joan's mother is somehow responsible for her being trapped in the romance story loop.
- Bleak Abyss Retirement Home: In issue #10, an elderly Joan spends her twilight years long after Don passes away in one of these. While the staff are shown to be kind, it's still a very melancholy place that Joan describes as being "a place to die," something that everyone understood but simply pretended to ignore. Ironically, this is the place where she ends up finding true love, bonding with another resident over their shared sense of mortality and living while they still can.
- Call-Back: In issue #7, while married to her current loop's love interest, Joan spends her nights reading romance novels before going to sleep. The stories she describes in the narration are the same as the ones she has lived through in past loops. In the issue #9, she watches an old Western movie based on the romance story where the Cowboy first killed her; of course, the movie has a happier ending.
- Cowboy: An assassin who shows up to kill Joan whenever she strays too far from the romance story she's currently living is almost always dressed as a cowboy, complete with six-shooters, a hat and a brown fringe jacket, and is only ever referred to as "the Cowboy", however his name is eventually revealed to be Jake Huff.
- Cruel Twist Ending: The "Too Hip for Love" arc has Joan's story continue after she gets the apparent love interest, Don, to propose to her after a drunken night out and follows her as the two of them marry, have children and grow old together until Don dies of cancer. Later, when she moves into a nursing home, she becomes friends with another resident there, Ralph, and falls in love with him for real. Right after they both profess their love for each other and kiss, another romance story starts for Joan like so many times before and she is heartbroken and furious that the whole life she just lived was swept away.
- Dating What Daddy Hates: One of Joan's first romance stories has her dating a hippie type of whom her strict father completely disapproves. He allows them to get together in the end, when the young man turns out to be son of a well-off friend of his.
- December–December Romance: In the last part of the "Too Hip for Love" arc, Joan, living in a retirement home, begins a relationship with another resident there, Ralph.
- The Dragon: The Cowboy, who shows up and kills Joan whenever she doesn't play along with the romance story she's in and tries to escape or shoot her way out. Apparently, he just serves the loop system on behalf of whoever is running it.
- Dwindling Party: Issue #4, "Nothing Left but Love", has Joan working as a singer at a bar in France during World War I, and her love interest this time is an English soldier named Bill who keeps coming to the bar with some fellow soldiers with whom he enlisted as a group.note They visit the bar to drink to the memory of a member of the group who died in combat, and keep doing so over the course of the war until only Bill is left alive.
- The Ending Changes Everything: Issue #3 ends on a bit of a twist that puts Joan's romance in a new light: the spinster librarian Joan is actually the real one, and the young Joan Peterson we've followed this time is a different one who by some quirk of this loop looks just like her and shares her name. Also, we learn that librarian Joan spent so much of her life traveling the world and never staying in one place too long because she was running from the Cowboy, but ended up drawn back to her original hometown and came back anyway.
- Fourth-Date Marriage: In issue #6, the first part of the "Too Hip for Love" arc, Joan, drunk and bored with her current story and setting, gets her current love interest, Don, to propose to her after they've only been out together a few times and she still hasn't broken up with that loop's "starter boyfriend". Surprisingly, this proposal actually sticks and her story goes on in her marriage to Don this time.
- Friendly Enemy: Throughout the "Too Hip for Love" arc, Joan has a lot of friendly encounters with the Cowboy in spite of all the times he has killed her in past stories. Later scenes suggest that at least some of those meetings were imaginary, though.
- Genre Deconstruction: The series is a deconstruction of romance comics, a genre that was popular in the around the 1950's before effectively becoming extinct in the 70's. The series hinges on the conceit that most romance comics of this era were extremely formulaic flim-flam, often with recycled setups and Romance Arcs but transposed between different-named characters and settings, with the serials that didn't just end on a marriage and Happily Ever After instead finding themselves a slave to the status quo just to keep the series going. Love Everlasting plays with it primarily with the fact that the main female lead is aware of all the love stories she's being recycled in and has become desperate to escape by any means necessary, to dark and psychologically intense results. The mysterious Powers That Be trying to enforce her in the role often brush against the conservative, traditional ideals of "love" and womanhood that these sorts of stories tended to appeal to, namely with the refusal to allow Joan to decide her own path and life, which is instead determined by the guy she ends up with, regardless of whether she actually loves him or not.
- Genre Shift: Even amidst the constant genre-hopping most of Joan's ventures take place in, the "Just West of Love" arc stands out by heavily toning down the romance tying everything together and being more of a traditional, gritty western. The basis for this is that its protagonist is not Joan, but The Cowboy, taking place in presumably his native time and following his exploits in finding and falling in love with Joan, who suddenly vanishes into thin air before him after they agree to marry, prompting his search across the west (and later, various other realities) in search of her.
- Genre Roulette: The various love stories Joan ends up in manifest across various different settings and tones, taking the form of a reserved but sweet Office Romance, the lighthearted young-adult hijinx of college students in The '50s, a handful of melodramatic tales taking place in the Wild West, the somber romantic drama amidst World War I, etc. The writing style usually tends to change to match the tone whenever Joan is actively playing along and not simply playing "herself".
- Generation Xerox: In issue #10, Joan gets a granddaughter named after her, who looks exactly like her. She grows up to have daughter of her own also named Joan who also has dark hair.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: The main setup of the series is its protagonist, Joan, being in a bizarre variant of this. While she doesn't find herself waking up to the exact same day and experiencing the exact same events, she instead has to experience the same "story" of finding love, enduring a Romance Arc, before becoming married to presumably live Happily Ever After, only for everything to reset in another time and place and with another man, something that Joan is keenly aware of. To make it worse, any attempts to avert the formula will result in her being murdered, as it turns out this loop is being actively imposed on Joan by outside forces.
- Happily Married: Deconstructed throughout the "Too Hip for Love" arc, where Joan ends up accepting a marriage proposal, but unlike every other loop that resets immediately afterwards, the story continues past it and she ends up living a full lifetime of marriage, seemingly for the first time ever. Joan is massively unprepared for this development and ends up living through her life almost entirely on inertia, though besides occasional appearances by The Cowboy (who pressures her to remain in line, but otherwise remains harmless) and the bizarre warping of time keeping everyone in the year 1963, everything mostly works out, settling down with a sincerely loving husband and raising two sons together... until one day, she snaps under the pressure and existential despair, ending up in and out of mental institutions for several years. In spite of this, Don remains patient and unfailingly loyal to Joan — when she confesses that she had shot and killed a neighbor's cat in a moment of weakness, Don reveals that he already knew, and asks her to keep it private as he can't bear to see her institutionalized again. Joan eventually has to endure the twilight of this love story with Don passing away from lung cancer and growing old as a widow. However, when confronted by the funeral home on whether or not she'd approve of being buried next to him with the tombstone reading "Loving Mother and Wife", Joan refuses, bluntly confessing "I never did love him." Yes, Joan accepted that Don was a good man, a good father who helped her raise their children even during her times of hardship, and she did miss him when he died... but she didn't love him, and her entire life and everything that resulted from their marriage was ultimately perfunctory on her part.
- Identical Stranger: In issue #3, young Joan looks exactly like librarian Joan and shares her name while looking nothing like her own parents.
- Incurable Cough of Death: In issue #9, part 4 of the "Too Hip for Love" arc, Don starts having severe coughing fits and even coughs up blood, which turns out to be a symptom of late-stage lung cancer.
- The Lost Lenore: During the "Just West of Love" arc, Joan herself ends up occupying this status. After she and the Cowboy — who is this story's protagonist — agree to marry and presumably live Happily Ever After, Joan — evidently still bound by the rules of the love-story-jumping situation she's in — suddenly vanishes before his eyes. Unable to let her go, he ends up travelling far and wide to find out what happened to her... and ends up finding himself in the employ of Penny Page, who has a job for him that will lead to Joan time and time again...
- Love Makes You Evil: The "Just West of Love" arc reveals that The Cowboy that had been hunting Joan and enforcing her compliance in her various love stories was himself one of her previous love interests. He was so unable to let Joan go after she promised they'd live happily ever after that he spent three years traversing the west — killing seventeen men, four women, and three babies — all just for a chance at being with her again. He ends up being discovered by Penny Page, revealing that she employed him as part of the unseen system responsible for Joan's situation, and despite bluntly telling him that the job she's offering is to find Joan and kill her, he accepts as he realizes it's the only way he will ever get to be with her again.
- Morton's Fork: Part of what makes the situation of Joan being trapped in constantly-resetting love stories so dire is the fact that if she plays along with the scenario, once she accepts her love interest's marriage proposal, the story resets. If she attempts to resist it and derail the story, she gets hunted down by the Cowboy who ensures her a bloody end, and the story resets. If she sincerely finds a human connection in her story and falls in love completely organically beyond the confines of the formula she's in, her story resets.Joan: What is this? What's the point of it? I run I'm fucked, I stay I'm fucked, I fight I'm fucked, I lie down with my fucking belly in the air, I'm fucked! Are you real? Am I? I don't fucking understand what this is!
- Office Romance: The very first romance we see in issue #1. And the only one played completely straight.
- Postmodernism: The series is a play on the Strictly Formula nature of classic western romance comics, often being simplistic Romance Arcs intended as Wish-Fulfillment-y fluff, transposed into various settings with new characters but fulfilling the same purposes, with long-running romance comics in particular featuring a strict adherence to the status quo that can keep the love story continuing for as long as possible. Love Everlasting features the story of the main female protagonist who is keenly aware that her life is a perpetual series of love stories that simultaneously keep changing and never change, and her attempts to defy the loop she's in results in dire and bizarre turns.
- Punch-Clock Villain: The Cowboy is gradually revealed to be this, serving a duty of killing Joan whenever she fails to stay in line with whatever love story she's in, but doing because the system maintaining her situation makes it so that this job is the only way he can ever see her again. While he is extremely ruthless and has racked up a high body count of non-Joan characters entirely of his own volition, his genuine love for Joan makes this an extremely bitter job for him to take part in. Issue #13 shows him acting early in his tenure, being hesitant to pull the trigger on the woman that he loves, even pleading with her to just accept her current love interest's marriage proposal so he doesn't have to do the deed.
- Revealing Continuity Lapse: The "Too Hip For Love" arc (issues #6-10) follows Joan in a particular life from being a young adult to an elder, yet throughout all of it, it appears to remain 1963 — she graduated in the Class of 1963, she became married in 1963, she moved into her first house in 1963, and both of her children were born in 1963 (despite being born two years apart), etc.. When she actually brings this up to her father, he points out that she was married 10 years ago in 1953, a definite signifier that something is actively screwing with whatever reality she's in.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Even though she plays along with the romances she is stuck in, Joan has fairly vivid memories of past loops, which becomes very confusing for her early on.
- Sanity Slippage:
- Joan experiences this in the very first issue, where she has conflicting memories of her past and current romances.
- In the "Too Hip for Love" arc, Joan tries to grin and bear it in her married life with Don. Eventually it becomes too much, she cracks and trashes their home, leading to the first of many stays in mental institutions.
- Shown Their Work: Tom King read several romance comics during their heyday from the 1940s to the 1970s for research.
- Stepford Smiler: In issue #7, after Joan marries her current story's love interest, Don, she and him move in together and have children and she becomes a housewife. For the first half of the issue, she seems happy with this existence, but then when she comes home one day, she snaps and trashes her living room. This and other events result in her being in and out of mental institutions for years.Joan: All the time, every day I fake it. Because it's as close to happiness as I can get. But a woman can get tired of faking it!
- Symbol Swearing: Cursing within the romance stories is usually censored this way. When people aware of how their world really work swear, like Joan, it's uncensored.
- Wham Episode:
- Issue #5, "Trapped in Love", finally gives at least some insight into what's going on with Joan. After defying the loop a few times too many, Joan is sent to a meeting with romance counselor Penny Page, who is actually employed by the system she's trapped in. It’s revealed that Joan has a complicated relationship with her mother, who may be responsible for Joan’s situation.
- Issue #11, "Just West Of Love" starts revealing the identity of The Cowboy: He’s one of Joan’s love interests. It also reveals that after she gets the Happy Ending, Joan vanishes from the story.
