Love Is Not Funny!

Millie the Model is not a romance comic.

Neither is Sunny or Candy or Mortie or Leave it to Binky or any of the other dozens of Archie rip-offs that started to flood onto the newsstands starting in the early 40s. While they preceded romance comics by nearly a decade (Archie first appeared as a back-up in an issue of Pep Comics in 1941), there really isn't a correlation between the two. I mean, romance comics weren't an off-shoot of the teen humor genre. (I'm not sure who dubbed these comics "teen humor", but they hit the nail on the head.)

Romance comics were a reaction to the popular romance and confession pulps and magazines, and the earliest issues were aimed squarely at adult women. That they changed (rather quickly) into being geared toward teen-age and younger girls is for another segment of "Thirty-two Pages of Love" (I'm sure you can't wait).

Anyway, Bob Montana (or, if you believe Archie publications, John Goldwater) created Archie in the early 40s as a comic book version of the very popular Henry Aldrich. Aldrich, a character in the stage play What a Life, in 1939 became a very popular radio show and was quickly dubbed "America's Favorite Teenager". His character, portrayed on the radio by Ezra Stone, and then on the radio and in movies by Norman Tokar, Dickie Jones, and others, was extremely successful, and the radio show lasted a very respectible 14 years.

Archie, however, surpassed Aldrich, both in comics (a Henry Aldrich series published by Dell starting in 1950 lasted only 22 issues) and longevity (Aldrich is now all but forgotten, while Archie Andrews is still a popular comic and licensing tool).

And while these types of comics preceeded and outlasted romance comics, they have certain characteristics that make them very different. First off, the style is much more cartoony. Montana, Dan DeCarlo, Bill Woggin, and others drew in the gag-strip style of exaggerated eyes, flailing limbs, and birds circling the head of an injured character. Also, romance comics didn't have a punch line. The final panel of Young Romance usually was either the loving embrace of a guy and his gal or a dejected, crying young woman watching her man walk away, arm in arm with her rival. Nothing funny about that!

Teen humor titles featured (obviously) teenagers, and such grown-up things like love, marriage, or even divorce were never mentioned. Instead, stories focused on getting some money to buy a malt or out-foxing your teacher or sneaking out of the house after your parents had grounded you.

Even titles that featured older teenagers (or early twenty-somethings) like Millie the Model rarely had anything to do with a serious situation (unless you call wearing the same dress as your rival to the Spring formal serious).

And lastly, romance comics never (or, rather, very infrequently) featured the same character month after month (the exceptions, like the two-issue Molly Manton's Romance or the soap-opera stories of the late 60s DCs, are blips on the radar). Once the story was over, the love won or lost, happiness or sadness, it didn't seem necessary to meet these characters any more. Their stories were powerful enough as they were. Those Riverdale kids, however, are back again and again, month (or week) after month, for 60-odd years.

I like some of these comics. I have my fair share of Patsy and Hedys, and the humor titles from Harvey (Stevie, Mazie, etc) have nice art and off-beat stories, but these feel likel the stepping stone from Disney comics to romance comics (and novels). As if you wouldn't read these comics long enough to get bored with the characters.

But they're not romance comics.