P.S., I Love You

I remember reading an interview with either Paul McCartney or John Lennon about how they wrote the lyrics to their earliest songs, and a point was made that they always wanted to have a personal pronoun prominently in the title and chorus. They though (and rightly so) that it made the person listening to the song more in-tuned to it.

She Loves You
Love Me Do
From Me to You
I Want to Hold Your Hand

And so on and so on.

They eventually changed their songwriting quite a bit, and their lyrics (and titles) became more introspective, less about the listener and more about themselves, but those first couple of albums were full of the stuff.

And, in case you didn't know, they were pretty sucessful.

That connection with the listener (reader) is similar in to what one romance comic publishers did a decade before the Fab Four. Fox published 21 different romance titles (not including a few that were merely rebound copies of older issues, with a new cover slapped on). Of those, 19 featured the word "My" to begin the title, and there was one "I" (the other was Women in Love; the publisher must've been out the day they decided to name that one). The titles were:

I Loved
My Confessions
My Desire
My Experience
My Great Love
My Intimate Affair
My Life
My Love Affair
My Love Life
My Love Memoirs
My Love Secret
My Love Story
My Past
My Private Life
My Secret Affair
My Secret Life
My Secret Romance
My Secret Story
My Story
My True Love

That's something, eh?

Here's what I know about Fox. I know that Victor Fox, the founder, worked for DC (then National Periodical Publishing) in the beginning of the Golden Age, possibly as an accountant. Rumor has it he saw how much money Harry Donenfeld was making from the new Superman character and raced and hired someone (Will Eisner) to create a super-hero comic that could be rushed to the stands. Donenfeld sued and won, and Wonder Comics (featuring Wonder Man) was cancelled (well, changed to Wonderwold Comics, sans Wonder Man).

Fox went on to publish several popular super-hero titles in their early-40s hey-day, including Blue Beetle, Mystery Men Comics, Big Three, The Green Mask, and more. But as the super-hero age started to fade away by the mid-40s, Fox got out of the hero business and into other genres, including crime, humor, and, of course, romance.

When I think of Fox, two things come to mind: 1) The covers were as provocative as you could get for comics. (Check out those Matt Baker Phantom Lady covers here if you don't believe me.) 2) The interiors were very subpar. Fox paid some of the worst page rates in the business, and many of his artists were either not very talented or just getting their toes wet and couldn't demand good money. Wally Wood did some of his first (and certainly his worst) work for Fox.

The printing was not very good (if you look at the covers to the two comics in the post, you'll see how there are odd red splotches -- they seeped through onto the other side of the cover as well; that's not a printing error, per se, just a bad printing job), and the inside comics often had off-register coloring or the plates were crooked.

Fox also did something odd with where they started their stories. The first page of the first story was published on the inside front cover, usually in either black-and-white or in 2-color (black, white, and red). I'm not sure why they did it (if anything, they gave up a cushy ad page), but it made it espectially odd when they published their reprint giants.

Fox took old, unsold issues of their comics, slapped four of them together, put a new cover on them, and sold them as for 25 cents. That Exciting Romance Stories is an example. While other companies did similar things (those EC giants being a good example), with Fox that inside front cover made for a problem. You see, for the first story for each of the four re-bound comics, you didn't get the first page! It just began with page #2!

I'm not sure if Fox or his editors cared much, frankly.

The stories themselves are some of the more adult-themed romance comics -- many involving women getting knocked around or threatened to, and many involve crime. (Fox also published at the time a couple of comics revolving around the no-good ladies -- Crimes by Women and the western Women Outlaws.) But they always tended to still end up with a happy ending, the guy who threatened his girl with a gun is either knocked unconscious by the man in the white hat or runs away, making the decision easy for which guy the gal should choose.

By early-1950, just a few months after they started their large publishing push, the largest in the company's history, they stopped their output completely, with all 21 romance (and another couple dozen crime, western, jungle, and humor) titles cancelled. Why? I'm not sure, and I have yet to be able to find out. Maybe the poor quality made for poor sales, and it caught up with them. It was before the more-serious comic witch hunts of later in the decade, so I don't think it was outside pressure.

Maybe if they would just have thrown in a "Your" now and again in the title of the comics, it would've changed everything.

"My" sounds so selfish, doesn't it?