Love Everlasting

Romance comics meet Quantum Leap in this quirky odyssey through time, space, and the heart from Eisner winner King (the Mister Miracle series) and Charretier (November). In the first foray, young secretary Joan Peterson finds passion with her boss. In the next tale, a 1960s folk singer is in love with rich girl Joan Peterson. In fact, all of the tales star an increasingly bewildered Joan Peterson, who bounces from life to life, now a frontier girl, next a Victorian-era maid, forever romanced. These sequential lives become more confusing and dangerous as memories of her past stories creep into her subconscious and lead to unexpected bloody endings. King energizes the familiar romance genre with twists and turns that fuse each of Joan’s trysts into an intricate puzzle. Suspecting sinister machinations behind this merry-go-round, Joan vows to hunt down the truth. Charretier’s thick-line cartoony character design, reminiscent of Darwyn Cooke, perfectly depicts this genre crossover, and Matt Hollingsworth’s colors capture the eeriness, avoiding primary colors with suitably subdued secondary palettes for each chapter. This series launch piles on the thrills and leaves tantalizing questions open. Readers will be eager to see the next volume. (Feb.)