Graphic Content: Love Everlasting written by Tom King and drawn by Elsa Charretier

 

Romance comics are often maligned for being not only formulaic but even misogynistic. The overall message of many of these comics is that the female protagonist in them must always find a man in order to achieve happiness. This is the hell in which protagonist Joan continuously finds herself, forced to constantly rediscover her one true love in Volume 1 of Love Everlasting. This book, written by Tom King and drawn by Elsa Charretier, is a surprisingly brutal, fantastical sendup of the trite romantic formula.
There are many different stories in this book, but they all star Joan, a woman who is constantly forced to find true love, whether it’s as a maid who works in her paramour’s house, a secretary with feelings for her dreamy boss, or a young woman who is trying to decide if settling down with her boyfriend is in her future. Joan has gone through multiple iterations of the same story, and no matter how many times she tries to escape, she is always killed and forced to repeat another doomed romance. 
This rom-com mashup of Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day gets a lot of miles out of the premise because it tells each of these stories with tongue firmly in cheek. Charretier’s artwork mimics the style of many of these comics, whether she’s incorporating more retro styles of clothing into her drawings or rendering these scenes in a completely different artistic style. She only ruins the illusion when Joan herself tries to fight back and is bloodily dispatched. 
King’s writing perfectly mimics the tone and dialogue of romance comics until they don’t. In these stories, Joan seems to be a willing, or at least unaware, participant until she receives a nagging sense that none of this is real (what it is, however, is still uncertain, meaning there will hopefully be more to this series). Fans of dark humor, violent shootouts, and mind-bending sci-fi concepts should immerse themselves in Joan’s stories as she tries to escape them.

Have You Read This? Always Listen to Her Hurt by Kenzie Jennings

 

There’s a lot of aspects about an author’s life that seep into their fiction, but it’s often that writer’s home that seems to leave the biggest footprint. Some of the more well-known examples of this are the creepy hamlets of Stephen King’s Maine or the crime-riddled backwoods of Chris Offutt’s crime fiction. Kenzie Jennings might be adding Florida to the list of literary locations explored on the printed page with her short story collection Always Listen to Her Hurt. 
Many of the stories from this collection hail from the Sunshine State, particularly those that look beneath the seedy, sweltering underbelly of Florida’s thriving tourism industry. These tales include the story of a harried mother at Walt Disney World or a woman whose vacation destination is a little more out-of-the-way, learning with frightening consequences why some beware of what some locals call “a local thing.” There’s one tale that’s even a revenge fantasy of obnoxious tourists getting their comeuppance from assassins whose specialty is dealing with unwanted guests. 
However, the stories in this collection aren’t all gleefully wicked gorefests. Jennings offers an explanation about all the stories here, but the horror becomes all too real when she explains how some writings are more biographical. These works are typically shorter, but they also offer some revealing glances at true emotional pain. Some might call it jarring, but the purpose of a collection is often to introduce readers to a writer’s overall body of work. What this collection does is show Jennings at her most creative and her most confessional.