Destined Love

Destined Love is a cool little meta-superhero comic set in the late 60s by Sandy Jarrell with Vance Sumner. It blends Astro City-like superhero daily life and real cultural history in the format of a nurse romance.

It’s an ambitious project that could go wrong so many ways but doesn’t. Annie meets the superhero Bastion of Freedom while treating one of the people he’s recently saved, and they have dinner together. She’s curious about his relationship with one of his teammates, an undersea princess, and he, being ageless, is having trouble adapting to recent social upheavals. (Since the story is set in the 60s, war protests are an undercurrent.)

Jarrell keeps dialogue-heavy panels moving with expression and gesture while also capturing action well when the story calls for it. The idea of a superhero experiencing generational pains, set against this country’s most prominent example of such, is an intriguing one. It captures a lot of this era’s concerns with superheroes subtly, without the obvious allusions or unfunny jokes that permeate the more self-conscious, more prominent stories trying to deal with genre change. Plus, the nurse and the hero go dancing.

Today, it feels a lot like The Incredibles or Noble Causes, although it predated those projects.