By Zack Quaintance — I swore, I swore would not read Substack comics, preferring instead to just engage with this material when it eventually got compiled and released as collections. This is going to sound self-important, but that was a consumer choice — I’m cautious about adding new monthly fees to my finances, and I’m also cautious about supporting another big tech platform with a ton of money where comics is a tiny fraction of its business (I already do plenty of that, sadly). Then Love Everlasting #1 by writer Tom King, artist Elsa Charretier, colorist Matt Hollingsworth, and letterer Clayton Cowles comes along.

The book looked great from the jump. Charretier is one of my favorite artists in monthly comics, as gifted as storyteller as she is an aesthetic cartoonist, and King, in my opinion, has recaptured and refined some of what made his breakout comics so special. Indeed, after a set of books that I thought were fine but just a little flawed to truly rank as top-tier, I’ve been enjoying King’s recent comics output as much as anything else this year, specifically books like Human Target, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and the forthcoming Batman: Killing Time. Team them with Hollingsworth and Cowles, and phew — that’s a nice creative team. But that’s not even what got me to read my first Substack comic.

Nor was it the concept of this book, which I also quite liked. The book was outwardly billed as a throwback to vintage romance comics, a riff on a genre that was once a cornerstone of the industry but in modern times as all but disappeared, lost beneath an onslaught (heh) of first superheroes and nowadays creator-owned genre fair that almost always lists towards sci-fi, horror, fantasy, or noir, leaving little air in the medium for quieter comics, especially not in the corners of the medium dominated by assembly-line creative processes and distribution through the direct market. So, yes, I was intrigued (more on the plot in a moment), but that’s still not what reeled me in.

What got me to read this comic was that the creators were making it available online for free. This erased my feelings about Substack being at best a bad deal for loyal readers and at worst exploitative of creators’ most dedicated fans, the folks who will follow them no matter how many obstacles — technological or financial — get put in their ways. See, the thing with Substack is it has from the jump been a good deal for creators. It offers top-tier comics pros gigantic sums of money (think half a million bucks) to make books they own the entire rights to. On top of that, it gives them a platform where they can then charge people $5 to $10 to read the stuff as it comes out. That model essentially requires less readers to make pros more money, and I tend to raise an eyebrow at anything that makes comics more insular (which is almost difficult given how insular it already is). But making a book downloadable for free — as this one and some others are — alleviates that concern on my end.

To be sure, I still have some complaints about Substack. They have platformed some heinous views, with leadership defending it as doing so being anti-censorship. To me, that’s not as ennobling as they think it is. No, it’s a company operating in the media space while abdicating any editorial responsibility as it churns profit. I’m personally not interested in support that, but, once again, this book is free, and moreover it doesn’t even require signing up for the Substack, so you’re not boosting any analytics except for total downloads. Which I understand if you don’t even want to do that much, but it was a decision I felt comfortable with.

All of that said, I absolutely loved Love Everlasting #1 as a comic on its own merits. It’s hard to discuss exactly why without outright spoiling the comic, but I’m going to do my best. As noted above, King seems to have recaptured some of the magic from his earlier comics, books like Omega Men and The Vision and even Grayson. Those series not only told complex, literary stories, but they did so playing on familiar character tropes while also taking risks with the nature of comics form. That’s exactly what you get from Love Everlasting #1, a cheeky experimental riff on vintage romance comics that engages readers who study and love comics tradition and past. It’s great work, made all the better by Charretier, who somehow elevates her storytelling — from expressions to perspective to character design — with every book, colored and lettered here perfectly by the subtle-yet-powerful rhythm section of Hollingsworth and Cowles.

And it’s toying with form in hammy, delightful ways. I’ll close by leaving you with the panel below. The book is a bit more complex than just touches like this, but if you’re like me, you’ll see this and know you’re in for a treat with this one.

Overall: Love Everlasting #1 is a very good comic, a cheeky and experimental riff on vintage romance comics that engages readers who study and love the medium’s traditions and past. 9.8/10

REVIEW: Love Everlasting #1

Love Everlasting #1
Writer: Tom King
Artist: Elsa Charretier
Colorist: Matt Hollingsworth
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
In this blood rose-tinted reality, Joan Peterson slowly discovers that she is trapped in a seemingly endless cycle—a problem to be solved, a man to marry—and every time she makes it, falls in love, kisses him, she disappears into another teary saga. She needs to find her way out, find who she is, what this world is. To escape, she must deconstruct her stories and reconstruct her identity.
Romance comics sold millions of copies. They are a reflection of America’s ongoing obsession with finding the happy, nice, right utopia to which we all might conform.
This comic is an examination of the perversity of this obsession, of the damage done, the hearts broken, the lives lost in pursuit of the beautifully impossible: of love everlasting. This is not just a mystery to be solved; it is an ongoing adventure, an exploration of the need for love. As Watchmen did for superheroes and Sandman did for horror, Love Everlasting will use the tropes of romance to explore the heart of humanity.
Download It Here: Love Everlasting #1

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.