They Just Grow Up So Fast Nowadays

This is installment three of the "why romance comics vanished" tutorial (you can read the first two here and here), and this time, I want to talk about the "changing times" (when I say things like changing times, I feel really old).

The influence of the late 60s and its counter-culture has been both over- and under-stated. It's been overstated because the whole summer of love and the Haight/Ashbury scene was just that -- a summer. (It reminds me of the Old West; the era of cowboys and indians, which has been captured in countless movies and books and TV shows and comics, lasted for only a couple of years, but you'd never know it from all the stuff out there.)

So while those no-good hippies and their funny cigarettes had their height of popularity (or whatever you'd call it) in the summer of '67, they quickly faded (the Woodstock festival in '69 seemed to be a swan-song of sorts) and were replaced with whatever came next (what did come next? what's between hippies and punks/disco?).

But many of the things that people associated with them -- sexual freedom, drugs, etc. -- became more accepted. Pot wasn't just a hippie thing any more, and drug use in general moved more into the mainstream. (While I don't think that marijuana is a gateway to other harder drugs like cocaine and heroin, I do think that a sociological acceptance of marijuana made those other drugs more likely to be tried by your white-collar executive and become more popular.)

Same goes for more openess of sexuality. The Stonewall riots of '69, while probably didn't make the gay lifestyle more accepted, brought things to light and created a greater legal (if not social) equality. Sexual promiscuity lost much of its taboo. It was free love, man!

And kids and teenagers knew about this. Parents, no matter how hard they tried, couldn't hide their children from these perverts and druggies and booze hounds. It was mayhem!

All exaggeration aside, it's obvious that society had drastically changed, and a lot of things couldn't keep up. One of those was comics.

Now super-hero comics are one thing. While Spider-Man's best pal Harry Osborn dropped his fair share of acid and Green Arrow's ward Speedy had a problem with smack, for the most part drugs were not a big problem in the super-hero universes of Marvel and DC. They didn't have to, because those guys (even the more down-to-earth Marvel heroes) fought larger-than-life criminals. Drugs and loose women aren't larger than life.

So yes, Superman wants to keep the drugs off the streets, but he goes about that by fighting Braniac, who has discovered a new, highly addictive opiate, not by shutting down the local street dealer. It just wouldn't work.

Romance comics are another story, however. They deal with the everyday life. Everyday life in the late 60s and early 70s was sex and drugs. But you can't talk about sex and drugs in a comic book. Not then at least. (Well, you could in Zap Comix or other underground titles, but that's a different thing altogether.) I really don't think that, as much as Stan Lee was a liberal thinker, he'd be willing to publish a story in Our Love where Suzy gets the clap or Jenny loses her boyfriend because she spends all her time high as a kite. The Comics Code wouldn't allow it, and I'm not sure if he'd even want to publish that.

And, yes, there were some drug stories published in romance comics in the early 50s, but they were few and far between, and they were relegated to smaller publishers (nothing from Fawcett or Marvel or DC, for sure).

And I think the readership just lost a lot of respect for romance comics. They were still telling stories about malt shoppes and dances, things that 12-year-old girls know about and care about, but they were just so saccharine sweet.

I really think that an ideal time to reintroduce romance comics to the market would've been in the Reagan-era 80s, where the drug and sex culture (while still there, obviously) was being pushed to the side, being portrayed as being deviant rather than just a part of American life. What better time to bring back the wholesome romance comic (and I'm not counting Angel Love, thank you very much)?