Thirty-two Pages of Love

Like Taking Candy From a Baby

2006-07-26T14:15:00.000-05:00

eBay specifically and the Internet in general has changed collecting -- I'm sure that is undeniable. What was once a wild-goose chase lasting for years and years has, in many instances, become a mere click away. Now, when I want to find a gravy boat for our Franciscan Starburst dinnerware, I don't have to go from flea market to antique shop to thrift store. I can more easily fire up the computer and there are several available for me to purchase.

Obviously, that's a boon if I need said gravy boat pronto. But as the holidays are still months away and a buying recepticle for fowl juices is not a life-or-death situation, I still have the option of trying out the old fashioned way of non-electronic searches and going to said flea markets and antique malls. For many, myself included, the hunt is as fun as the acquisition.

There's also the cost to consider. While that gravy boat may run you $40 on eBay or $60 from a dealer in Prescott, Arizona, there's a chance I could find it for $5 at Al's Antique Alley or at the local Salvation Army.

The same goes for comic books. It took me years to complete my Marvel Daredevil collection, and after I finally got issue #2 (the last piece of the puzzle) after starting to search for the run a decade before, I was elated. In those days, I found the older issues by one of three methods.

One, I could go to local comic shops. This proved to be fruitful in the beginning, but as the issues I searched for were the more rare and expensive ones, the comic shops either didn't have them in stock or, if they were, they were out of my meagre price range. (Beachead Comics, which was in the city next to the one where I grew up, is a good example of that. They always seemed to have nice comics to buy, but they were so overpriced, I found myself often leaving with nothing when they had things in stock that were on my want list.)

My second option was the infrequent comic conventions that found their way into the Lehigh Valley. Unable to make my way to Philadelphia or New York on my own, I would have to wait to see if Jubilee Comic Conventions, who usually held theirs in Maryland, Virginia, and southern New Jersey, would grace the Allentown Holiday Inn ballroom with their twice-yearly presence. There was always plenty of things to buy there -- good prices, too -- but they only had them every six months and, near the end, every year. My passion for collecting couldn't stand the wait.

The last option was the Comic Buyer's Guide, now a monthly magazine, but up until a few years ago a weekly, newspaper for comic book news, reviews, columns, and, best yet, sales. Each Thursday, I'd get my copy in the mail, and before reading any of the editorial content, I'd scour the ads looking for those books to fill in the holes of my collection. If I found something I wanted, I'd quickly call the seller, reserving it if it was still available, and then running off to the post office to get a money order. I subscribed to the CBG for years, only briefly giving it up while I was in college and had no money to buy anything but newer, must-have books.

Between the three of those things, I was able to get a lot of cool old comics, and I was very content in the three-pronged search.

That all changed with eBay. Before, I could go for months without seeing that last issue of Thor I needed to complete my Simonson run. Now, type in the search field, and 5 were right there, many at prices well below a store, convention dealer, or CBG advertizer. For me, a steady super-hero buyer who had little need for high-grade or pedigree copies, it was a godsend, and I think many people felt the same way.

But eBay also changed some things about what people bought and how much prices changed all due, I feel, to the anonymity of Internet shopping.

For a long time -- and this is something I noticed as both a collector and retailer (I worked for comic shops and convention dealers) -- romance comics and super-heroine comics didn't sell. At all. (Except for those rare cases where there was some serious t&a or bondage or Matt Baker/Bill Ward art.) But copies of Wonder Woman sat in the bins. Mary Marvel sales were frigid. And My Romance copies collected dust.

My theory is, men don't want to be seen buying this stuff. A 40-year-old buying Wonder Woman? A 50-year-old perusing the romance comic section? Heaven forbid. But online, behind the comfort of a computer screen and a PO Box, people will buy anything. And sales of romance comics and women super-heroes exploded. What once sat for years unsold where whisked away to the nether regions of New Jersey, California, and South Dakota. If you search the Golden Age Wonder Woman listings on eBay, you'll see books go for closer or above guide.

Online, these books sell great. In store, however, they still sit.

Now this is just a theory, but one that was proven right this past weekend. The wife and I went and visited a friend in Omro, Wisconsin (a destination if I ever there was one), and there went to various antique-y places in search of cool things to buy. In Oshkosk, I stopped in a comic shop, and there found a small stack of romance comics, including an early My Own Romance, two copies of Teen-Age Romances (with Matt Baker cover and art, one of which is pictured above -- scan courtesy of the Grand Comics Database), a Prize Young Romance, and a couple of others. And they were cheap. Dirt cheap. Six comics, under $25. Put those same on eBay, and they're $50.

So what I'm saying is, things have changed because of the Internet and eBay. In many instances, you can get things for a nice discount over regular brick and mortar prices. But in some -- especially those niche things (which I include romance comics) -- you're actually paying a premium.

Have you noticed anything similar?

Online Love

2006-07-19T16:31:00.000-05:00

About a year ago, I read about a Website called www.myromancestory.com which the site proclaims to be "Romance stories in a graphic novel format" and "All online in vibrant color pulsing to the beat of today's music. Escape into a fantasy experience that will excite your senses." They were being released by Arrow Publications, which you can read about here in their own words. I had never heard of them before, and there was nobody comic-book related associated with the company (that I could find), but I was, to say the least, interested. So I checked out a couple of their stories about 6 months ago -- they have 2 that are free, and you can either subscribe for a monthly fee ($4.99) and read all you want or purchase them individually for $1.99.

After reading the two free ones half a year ago (and another today), I've decided against taking the plunge into actually buying them.

You see, they're just not good. They are extremely wordy and the art is subpar, and save for Ron Randall (who I recognize as being a DC and Star Wars artist from years past), I've heard of nobody. Not that it's that important that these are name people -- everyone was an unknown at one time -- but these guys are unknown because... well... they're just not very good.

As bad as it is visually, it's even worse story-wise. The writers are nobody I've heard of (again, not that it's a big deal), but it doesn't seem like they're comic book writers. They're romance fiction writers. Gail Hamilton (one of the more prolific authors on the site) has written numerous romance novels. Cynthia Starr as well.

And I'm not saying that writers from one genre can't be good in another. It's just that the writer should actually make it seem like they're writing for that different style. These stories read like someone just plopped their prose story into comic book form, without real understanding of what comics are about. You don't shoot a movie from a comic book script. You don't draw a comic book from a novel.

The biggest problem, however, is how much they read like the worst romance comics of the past -- namely the sappy Charlton comics of old. They are filled with these silly whirlwind trips to all these exotic places, muscle-bound gents, and the escape from normal life. You can only read that so much. While much of the romance comics of the 50s had similar plotlines, the stories were actually much more down-to-earth and, while not exactly realistic, plausible.

My take is that if you're going to bring the romance comics genre back, you're going to have to do something new with it. Unfortunately, myromancestory.com falls well short.

Now where was I (redux)...

2006-07-17T16:02:00.000-05:00

My wife and I (I almost typed, "the wife," but I remembered how much she hates that) bought a condo a month-and-half-ago, and in the preparation for doing so and all the hassle after, I'd nearly forgotten about romance comic books.

I know, I know. How can that be? you ask. Well, when the weight of a gigantic mortgage is looming ahead, you stop thinking about the wonders of 50s pulp and instead start dreaming of 50s wiring (when I think our place was last updated).

But now that things have calmed down and we've nearly finished unpacking (only slowed recently by the opressive heat), my mind again has returned to the wonderful world of love, the four-color variety.

In the months that I've been gone, however, not much else has changed. Manga is still the lone voice of love, Marvel released its reworkings of old romance comics (which I did not buy) and a romance trade paperback (ditto), and for the most part, the genre (and most non-super-hero ones) are still nearly forgotten.

It's a lonely plight, this love of romance comics.

I'll be posting more often again, with more covers, more interesting tidbits on comics history, and more links (if I can find them). I promise.

Love Is in the Air

2005-12-29T22:03:00.000-06:00

Recently, there have been some articles on various comic news sites about comics from the 80s: specifically, Strikeforce: Morituri and Spider-Ham. It wasn't really surprising to me that the comment sections after both articles featured scores of people proclaiming how great these were, how much they missed them, how much they'd love to see something new. The crazy thing is (well, it's not so crazy) is that these series sold terribly. As I mentioned before, I worked in a comic shop during the time these were published, and they were always at or near the worst sellers Marvel had.

I honestly don't remember either series' storyline, although I think I read both. They were not, to me, memorable in the least.

Now I'm not saying that they weren't good, but neither really made me think twice when they were cancelled.

But people are going crazy about them. (One person said he can now die happy that they had a Spider-Ham cover. Do I sound that silly when talking about my own hobby?) I wonder where were these people when it was being published 20 years ago? Were they collecting comics? And, if so, were they buying the series? Because not many people were.

I mention this because I wonder if there was any outrage when DC stopped publishing their romance books in the late 70s. Were there letters to the editor? Were there young girls weeping at the newsstand when the next Young Love failed to arrive? Even the most popular comics of the 60s and 70s only got around 50 letters to the editor each month; I can only imagine if, by the time the romance comics began to die, anyone even cared.

I think the one thing that I (and possibly you, the reader) take for granted, however, is that we've all been reading comics for a long time. In my case, more than 20 years.

Nobody who wrote, drew, or published comics in the 40s-60s ever thought that they were doing so for people who had been reading them for two decades. They didn't think they needed much continuity in their stories; they didn't think that a hero's origin or powers or sidekick need be there every month, because you probably weren't reading the title 5 years ago when these things were introduced in the first place.

Yes, there were numbers on the comics, and they certainly made it seem like they had been around for a while, but very few readers actually cared what happened before. And most didn't read them long enough for it to matter if stories were retold or reprinted. People didn't know the difference.

How times have changed. (I sound like an old man, don't I?)

If I write an article for Newsarama about romance comics, how many people do you think will write, "Oh man, romance comics! They were awesome! If they start publishing them again, I could die happy!"

Edit This!

2005-12-04T20:35:00.000-06:00

For the past several years, I've been a writer/editor. (Amazingly, this doesn't pay my bills. Can you believe it?) I work in the medical and pharmaceutical field, and in my job I take information that seems complicated (such as medical things are wont to do) and I try to edit and rewrite it to make it less complicated. It's all a very exciting thing.

Comic book editors, though, do something a little different. Today, editors are there to plan out the future of the titles they're given to work on, deciding such things as who will write and draw them, what the general direction of the stories may be, and controlling how those stories fit into the general "universe" in which they live (such as the DC and Marvel and Image universes). To me, this is much more exciting than doing research on cystic fibrosis.

Editors of the past, however, often did much more than just help out the storytellers. They would give the writers the story. So, Julius Schwartz would have some of his writers come in -- a John Broome or a Gardner Fox -- and he'd say, "I want a story about the Flash where he saves the world by making everything full of static electricity." The two would then hammer out a plot and Fox or Broome or whomever would go back to his house and type of the script. He'd return, and it would start all over again.

In other companies, the editor was much more hands off. Stan Lee at Timely/Atlas would gather scripts from his own group of writers, edit them as needed, and then keep them in a pile for when his artists came to the office to drop off work and pick up something new. Not so much control there. Of course, in Lee's situation, he was nearly always the only editor on staff, and he alone had to control dozens of titles.

DC (going back to Schwartz) had it much different. Editors would often control groups of titles. Mort Weisinger controlled the Superman titles in the 50s and 60s. Schwartz had his hand in all of the non Superman/Batman titles. Robert Kanigher had the war books and Wonder Woman. And so on.

The romance titles were shuttled about among different editors for a while, including Schwartz and Kanigher, until Phyllis Reed came on the scene in late 1957. There were few women in comics at the time, and even fewer working on romance comics, but Reed lasted for 5 years at DC, at a time when their line expanded with the influx of the Fawcett and Prize titles that came their way (Heart Throbs, Young Love, and Young Romance). This was also the time when, I think, the DC romance titles were at their peak. Artistically, with the likes of John Romita and John Rosenberger and Jay Scott Pike, the books looked tremendous. The stories were also really emotional -- not too cheesy or silly or immature.

I mentioned that she passed away not too long ago, and I did some research to try and see what she did before and after DC, but I couldn't come up with anything yet. While there was plenty of comics fandom going on at the time, unfortunately none had to do with romance comics, and her legacy, compared with Schwartz or Kanigher or Weisinger, seems to be lost.

A shame.

Why Must They Disagree With Me?

2005-11-29T19:17:00.000-06:00

Comic Book Artist was (and is, whenever they decide to put out new issues) one of the best magazines about comics ever. Not as literary (and not full of Ken Smith) as The Comics Journal, it was the best of many different worlds -- comic history, current creators, interesting interviews, etc. When CBA left TwoMorrows (for some reason that I really don't know and don't want to) and moved to Top Shelf, TwoMorrows (also the publisher of the equally good Alter Ego and Jack Kirby Collector) replaced it with Back Issue.

Back Issue, edited by Michael Eury, focuses mostly on comics from the 70s and 80s, with plenty of interviews with their creators, and some "lost" art (usually from fans' sketchbooks). To me, it is the Wizard magazine for those over 30, and like Wizard, it is not very good. The articles are thin, the scholarship (if you can call it that) is weak, and it seems that in every issue I've read (about 4 of them) the questions that seem most important never get asked.

I hadn't bought or read an issue in about a year until I saw the ad in Previews for the most recent issue, #13. They were going to have an article on the death of romance comics.

I had to buy it. And I did.

The article, "The Terrible, Tragic (>Sob!<) Death of Romance (Comics!!)" (all punctuation theirs), was written by John Lustig, the Last Kiss creator. In its seven pages, Lustig illuminates why he (and others) think that romance comics stopped being published. There are numerous reasons he cites, many of which are backed up by romance comics fans or those in the industry. Some, like Dick Giordano or Michelle Nolan or Richard Howell, I've heard of. Others, I have no real clue about what makes them any more of an expert than my wife. (Boy, I sound real bitchy here, don't I?)

Anyway, the big reason Lustig says romance comics died was television.

Virtually everyone who was interviewed for this article blamed TV (at least in part) for the decline in comics readership in general and romance comics in particular. To find romance and sex all you had to do was turn on your TV. And if you watched some of the increasingly racy soap operas... you'd learn more than you could get out of any romance comic.

Why does everyone blame television for the demise of comics? Since the beginning of comics, there was competition. Radio, movies, TV -- it was always there. But somehow, in the mid-70s, it hurt romance comics.

Joe Gill, prolific writer for Charlton, said in the article, "Television changed all the values of the (subsequent) generations... enormously. They found out about sex and drugs. It was pretty sordid. And these harmless little comics had no place in their lives." That is an argument you hear every year: that kids and teens are getting too adult, that they're too mature, that they won't like things that their parents did or their parent's parent. Bull. You don't have to be a sociologist to know that people like the same types of things, regardless of the era, and that we are no less moral, less innocent, than those living in the 50s.

So while the "values" argument is bunk, what about TV itself? Well, while I'm not so sure that outside media help the sales of comics (the Spider-Man movie didn't really increase the sales of the Spider-Man comic), it didn't hurt it. In the 50s, Westerns on TV were huge. My mother loved them. Couldn't get enough of them. What was the most popular time for Western comics? Why, the 50s! So why didn't Westerns on TV ruin Western comics?

Who knows. But we know they didn't. So I don't see any evidence that soap operas on TV would make people less likely to buy romance comics.

Other reasons given in the article were the proliferation of Harlequin romance books in the 60s, underground comics, the demise of the newsstand, and romance in super-hero comics. Those reasons just don't fly with me.

By the 60s, when Harlequin romances were first flourishing, the romance comics readership was almost completely teens and younger. You could tell by the stories within the comics -- they focused on teenage girls or those just out of high school. They were not competing with Harlequin romances. It's almost like saying crime comics in the 50s were competing with Jim Thompson or David Goodis. That's not competition. It's the same genre, in a different medium, going after a different audience.

Undgerground comics were not competition. I don't know how else to say it, but Zap and its ilk did not make people less likely to buy Young Romance. How do I know? Because by the time that underground comics made their way out of the head shops and into "normal" society, romance comics' fate had already been sealed.

Demise of the newsstand? Nah. When did the direct market begin and when did it become viable? The former in the mid-70s and the latter in the late 70s. No romance comics then, people. Not a factor. (In fact, growing up in Bethlehem, PA, population 80k, I bought my comics at Matz's newsstand until 1985, when Dreamscape Comics opened up.)

Romance in super-hero comics? Well, they were there, that's for sure. Peter Parker's love troubles were often the key to the issues, but I'm not sure how that would've affected romance comics sales. For one, by the time the Marvel Age came around, romance comics were already in a severe tail-spin, with only 4 publishers even doing romance comics (Marvel, DC, Charlton, and ACG). For another, while girls were reading Marvel super-hero comics more than others, I can't see that a person reading romance comics would stop collecting them because you could find them in that month's Fantastic Four. Perhaps that would make them read FF as well, but I doubt if they would be at the expense of Secret Hearts.

Lustig does touch on our shared idea of the new creators of the 70s, who grew up on super-heroes, would be less likely to want to create romance comics, but he relegates that to end.

The article ends with a question: Could anything have saved romance?

Dick Giordano answers: "No, I think the time for romance comics was past and no amount of doctoring could change that."

Wow.

I can think of a lot of doctoring could've saved them. Just like I think things could've saved sci-fi comics or Westerns or any of the other genres that disappeared once the people in charge stopped caring about them and focused only on super-heroes.

It was a good shot by Lustig, but I think he took the easy way out. Why romance comics died in the mid-70s have more to do with why they became less popular in the late 50s than in the late 60s, but he skips that completely.

Not to worry, though. I'm on the job!

Now where was I...

2005-11-16T14:19:00.000-06:00

It's been a hectic month. This new job... well, let's just say that I'm actually required to do work. The nerve of these people!

Anyway, a few snippets of things that I'll be expanding on in the next few days:

1) We have a winner for the romance comics contest. There were about a half-dozen entries, and I wrote everyone's names out on a small piece of paper, put them in a brown paper bag, and had a co-worker pick one out. The winner is Penny Kenny (who I have to e-mail and get her address to mail them). Congratulations, Penny. I hope that you'll have the time to write up a bit of a review in the near future of what you think.

2) Recently, former DC romance editor Phyllis Reed passed away. She edited the line from the late 50s to the early 60s, and oversaw some of the last great DC romance stories (and, as I stated elsewhere, my favorites). Yes, they were squeaky clean, and yes, they were very one-dimensional. But the art was terrific, the stories weren't dumb (just hokey -- a difference), and the packaging was top notch. One of the interesting things about DC's from that era is that you could always tell who the editor of the comic was just by looking at the indicia on the bottom of the first page. So, you could tell what Julie Schwartz edited or what Jack Schiff edited (although, they weren't always accurate). I'll try and do a little more research on Ms. Reed.

3) Back Issue magazine came out today with the "Why Romance Comics Went Away" article. Written by John Lustig (who you'll hear about later and who I've written about in the past), I glanced through it a bit at lunch, but there were so many things that I disagreed with, I'll want to spend a full post just taking it apart. There were a couple of things that jived with my own thoughts, but for the most part, a lot of the premise of his thesis is based on incorrect information.

4) Marvel Comics' latest solicitations came out yesterday, and there are numerous romance comics-related info. They're putting out a series of comics called "I (Heart) Marvel", which they describe thusly: "Sometimes, your favorite super heroes just need a little love. Help us pay homage to the romance comics of yesteryear with five two-fisted, love-centric one-shots in the Mighty Marvel Manner. They're all perfect to share with that special someone this Valentine's Day." Sigh... romance comics with super heroes. The titles are "Web of Romance," "Outlaw Love," "My Mutant Heart," and "Marvel AI" (which I take to be manga super-hero romance). I've spoken before about this need for everything not super heroes (especially from Marvel) to somehow involve super heroes and how they're completely missing the point. Marvel does not equal the big picture.

They're also beginnin a 5-issue series where they Lustig-ize old romance stories. Lustig-ize is a word I made up where new dialogue (obviously uber-hip) replaces the old, "tired" original. I hate this crap. I really do. I think it demeans what was done in the past, making the creators from the 40s, 50s, and 60s play the part of the fool. I'll get into this a lot more later...

Marvel also is putting out a 176-page trade paperback, "Marvel Romance" (who comes up with these titles?), where they reprint stories from "LOVE ROMANCE #89 and #101-104; MY LOVE #2, #14, #16 and #18-20; TEEN-AGE ROMANCE #77 and #84; OUR LOVE STORY #5; and PATSY WALKER #119." If you'll notice, all of these stories are from the 60s on, long past when Marvel was producing its best stuff. I realize it sounds like I bitch and moan at whatever Marvel does, but really, would it have been so difficult to publish something before super-heroes (all of these comic stories were from post-Marvel Universe)?

Anyway, I'll be writing more about all this.

And I'm sure glad to be back.

Reminder and Apology

2005-10-17T21:52:00.000-05:00

Three weeks ago I started a new job. My last job was one where I did little or nothing for days at a time. It wasn't because of my slacking off. It was because they had no work for me to do.

None.

So I would blog. And blog. And write e-mails. And blog.

This new job is a little different in that I actually have work to do. Go figure!

So until I get everything sorted out and find time in the evening to put up new romance comic-related posts, they will be a little sparse. I apologize.

But I do want to remind you of my "free romance comics" giveaway. I've had several e-mails and posts, and I know that there are more of you out there. Next Monday is the cutoff.

Also, I mentioned Bill Draut in my last post, and I got an e-mail from Mr. Draut's daughter asking me if I knew him personally. I did not, but perhaps you did. He worked for the Simon/Kirby outfit for many years, mostly on the books they packaged for Prize Comics. If you knew him, e-mail me, please, and I'll get you in touch with his daughter.

You're Ugly!

2005-10-13T19:17:00.000-05:00

Jack Kirby is, without question, one of the greatest comic book artists of all time. He helped create some of the seminal characters of the last 60 years of pop culture, and his style was influential in moving comics from a bunch of newspaper strip rejects to its own art form.

But, boy, does he draw some ugly women.

Which only makes his contribution to romance comics more puzzling (maybe puzzling isn't the word... astounding?).

Kirby’s strength was his dynamic artwork. Not constrained by the smaller comic strip format, Kirby was one of the first artists that exaggerated the action, using all of what the comic page would allow (other great early examples are Lou Fine and Will Eisner). Punches flew off the page. Cars and spaceships hurtled through the void. (Corny, isn’t it?) Yet by the late 40s, not even 5 years after drawing the "Manhunter" and Boy Commandos for DC, Kirby was drawing romance comics, where there were no spaceships, no punches, nothing flying through space.

And while Kirby (and his partner Joe Simon) saw the opportunity in romance comics and they both produced them for years (with Kirby returning to them in the late-50s and 60s when he came back to Marvel), I don’t think their work was all that good. Yes, there was emotion there, and yes, they were some of the most mature things ever produced in comic book form, but they were wordy and stiff and, again, not so attractive. (At least the Simon/Kirby stories in those comics.)

John Romita, the artist on dozens of romance stories for DC during the 50s and 60s, drew beautiful women. Matt Baker drew sexy women. Alex Toth drew a very mature woman. Jay Scott Pike drew a woman with flair.

Kirby? He drew a woman that always seemed on the brink of either a screaming fit or just plain screaming or being severely constipated. (I have to admit that he drew good “bad” guys – you know, the fellow who the girl should dump so she could instead date the nice fellow.)

Other artists working for Simon and Kirby illustrated early stories in their Young Romance-family of titles, including Mort Meskin (one of my favorites), Jerry Robinson (a studio-mate of Meskin), Bill Draut, Bruno Premiani (of Doom Patrol fame), and many more. Most of these artists were not as adept at drawing super-hero fisticuffs, but they had Kirby beat with the ladies.

The covers to Young Romance and Young Love (Simon and Kirby's first two series) were line drawn at first. Very soon after their launch (issue #13 for Romance, issues #2-11, then #23-53 for Love), they started to have photo covers. Why they changed seemed pretty cut and dried.

When Timely/Atlas (which later became Marvel) jumped into the romance arena, the immediately published photo covers (which pre-dated the first Prize photo covers by a couple of months). Likely, Stan Lee (and later the publishers at Prize) wanted to make the romance comics look more like the ladies magazines on the stands (I always wondered why they didn’t make them magazine sized). It’s a good marketing tool – make your product look just like something the same potential customer would buy. (Timely/Atlas was also publishing crime comics with photo covers, another genre with numerous magazine counterparts.)

Yet another part of me wants to say that S/K realized that these line-drawn covers just weren’t cutting it, that other publishers who were coming into the romance biz had artists that were able to draw a little sexier or prettier (or in the case of Fox, smuttier).

It's difficult for me to fault the guy when it comes to his art. Kirby was terrific, one of the best.

He just didn't draw very attractive women, is all.

After Simon and Kirby split and Kirby eventually returned to Atlas (a company he hadn't worked for since he and Simon left in the early 40s after a dispute over monies owed for Captain America), he jumped back into the romance ring. Still, it wasn't great stuff, and Stan Lee realized this. Kirby only did a handful of these stories, and Lee had him drawing more of the monster and suspense (and eventually super-heroes) stories.

Yet even when he returned to a bit of the lovey-dovey stuff (I'm thinking of his Sue Storm/Reed Richards romance or Johnny/Crystal), the women still didn't look all that great. Over in Amazing Spider-Man, John Romita was drawing those drop-dead gorgeous gals, Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacey. There was no comparison.

Pardon my rambling, but I'm trying to be as gentle as possible. You don't want to badmouth a king too much, or you're likely to find yourself in the dungeon.

Free (Romance) Comics!

2005-10-09T16:28:00.000-05:00

A couple of blogs that I really enjoy in the recent past have offered a free comics stunt. I "won" Epileptic (by David B.) from Yet Another Comics Blog (their monkey covers are tops), and I also got a nice manga book from Tangonat (I'll get around to reading it soon, I promise), and in both cases, it seemed that these people wanted to spread the word on some of the comics they enjoyed.

Well, I'm doing the same.

I'm going to give away a pack including one romance comic from the 50s, 60s, and 70s (and one Charlton, so you can understand why I don't really care for them). I'm not sure what they're going to be, but they'll probably be some half-decent stuff, stuff that I think people who don't regularly read them will enjoy.

Send me an e-mail or post something in the comment section about why you want to read these romance comics. It doesn't have to be a 1,000-word essay, but I also don't want it to be "Put me in the raffle for the comics". Now the winner isn't determed on whether or not they write a good entry; it's more that I want to separate those who want to win from those who just want to enter. All entries will be picked out of a fishbowl by the wife (an unbiased person if I've ever met one). I'd like someone who is truly interested in reading them to get them, and I'd also like for that person to then write why (or why not) they liked them. I'll post that on the blog as well (as long as the winner okays it).

So get to it, people! I know you want to! E-mail me or post something in the comments section. You have 2 weeks (until Sunday, October 23).

Some People...

2005-10-03T20:50:00.000-05:00

I have a counter on my site. I added it because I already have an account with StatCounter (a free site that I like quite a bit) and it was easy to do. I'm mostly interested in my business Web site (Chicago Comic Conventions), to see how many people are clicking on it, where they're coming from (to see if my advertising is effective), and how many pages they look at.

With this site, though, I don't really get enough hits in the day to make it so interesting, and this is not a money-making enterprise (well, to tell you the truth, neither is the convention). But the one very cool thing the counter does is that it will tell me what keywords people use to get to this site. There have been a few for "romance comics" and a lot for my post on ACG's "Truvision", but the majority have been for (and I'm sure you'll never guess what)... porn.

Well, not porn so much as "booty". I used the word as a title for my Wizard World Chicago purchases, and man... there's a lot of people looking for booty (and I bet most of them aren't interested in my kind).

There have also been some for interracial porn (I don't know how they got here from that), 50s porn, and, of course, manga porn.

Who would've guessed that there were that many people looking for naked pictures on the Internet?

(That's sarcasm, people.)

Of course, with this post, even more people are going to be coming here looking at this site.

My mother would be so proud of me.

Dizzy Love

2005-10-01T18:21:00.000-05:00

In the late-90s, Vertigo (under the editorial thumb of Axel Alonso) released several different anthology titles. One, Flinch, was an ongoing series that lasted around 13 issues. A few others, however, were 4-issue mini-series: Gangland (crime stories), Strange Adventures (sci-fi), Weird War Tales (horror-war), and Heartthrobs (one word, surprsingly, and, of course, romance). Anthology titles (at least from Marvel and DC) had become nearly extinct. Marvel for almost 7 years published Marvel Comics Presents, a series that featured four 8-page stories an issue, many of which lasted for several issues, telling a longer story. They also published Marvel Super-Heroes, a reprise of their 1960s title, that would publish inventory stories that never made it to the regular series.

Neither of them (with some exceptions) featured anything particularly good.

DC last tried the anthology genre (I believe) in the 80s, with Time Warp, a short-lived sci-fi title that had some nice Mike Kaluta covers.

I think both companies understood that people would much rather read the continuing life of a specific character. Or maybe that's just what they wanted to write and draw. Who knows.

But they're not around much any more, although several smaller companies have tried it (Dark Horse Comics Presents is the first one to come to mind). None to much long-lasting success.

I suppose that Vertigo was as good a place as any to try them again. They were cutting edge there, not afraid to try different things. And while some things didn't work, they at least tried them. And I, in turn, try out their titles a lot. I'm much more willing to buy a trade from Vertigo now or buy the first issue of a series than many other publishers or imprints. They've earned that right.

The problem with some of their titles, though, is that they're quite aware of their own brilliance. There's a delicate balance between being clever and trying to be clever. Sandman was extremely clever, if not intelligent and at times quite beautiful. Rachel Pollack's Doom Patrol (and she had a unenviable task of having to follow in Grant Morrison's steps) was a mish-mash of annoying and just trying too damn hard. It fell flat.

So it was with these anthology titles -- especially Heartthrobs. It seemed that many of the writers hurt their shoulders by patting themselves on the back, these tales were so darn clever.
Yes, there were plenty of good things about them. The first issue had a story about a young, gay man who is "changed" into straightness (written by Robert Rodi and drawn by Phil Jiminez, two of the few comic creators who are "out"), the third had a cool story by Peter Milligan and a pre-100 Bullets Eduardo Risso ("Death of the Romantic"), but most of the stories were odd. And not good odd. I like odd. I'm all about odd. But these were not compelling odd (compelling odd, to me, is Crispin Glover in Back to the Future; compare that with Crispin Glover in Willard -- see the difference?).

Also, there were too many romance stories that weren't really romance stories. They were crime stories or sci-fi stories. I'm sure most of you have read various EC Comics before. You know how there would be stories about a man who loved his wife so much he had her killed and stuffed? Or people who fell in love with space aliens who then just watned to eat them? Well, to me, those are horror and sci-fi stories. Because they're about the murder or the alien. They're not about the love.

Same goes with these stories. They're not romance stories.

And I guess that's okay. I mean, look at that cover for issue #2. That doesn't really say love to me. Of course, my S&M phase was a long time ago.

I kid.

I'd just like comics to try to have straight romance or straight war or straight Western titles again. They can be good, I know it. And they don't have to try and be so damn clever.

Some Things to Think About

2005-09-28T20:59:00.000-05:00

An upcoming issue of Back Issue magazine (published by the nice folks at TwoMorrows, who also publish the Jack Kirby Collector and Alter Ego, among others) is going to feature an article called "The Death of Romance (Comics)". The biggest thing you should know about this is that I didn't write the article. I have no clue who did, actually, but I'll still be buying it, and after reading it, I'll likely review it and give it my thumbs up or thumbs down.

I was thinking about the lack of minorities in comics the other day, and specifically in romance comics (but not exclusively). The thing is, while minorities are underrepresented in comics (everything from super-hero comics to sci-fi comics), I'm not so sure that comic fans are racially underrepresented. Go to a big city convention, and it's not as white as one would think (just as it isn't as male or overweight male). I know of a comic shop owner who has opened a couple of shops in areas that are racially mixed in Chicago, whose client base swings more toward non-white (black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.) customers than white ones.

However, I think if (no, be positive, WHEN) romance comics come back full swing, they will have to deal with less of what was going on in the 50s-70s (you know, either suburban white couples or wealthy, urban couples, not a black or Asian or Mexican face to be found). Why? Because super-heroics don't have anything to do with real life. Yes, Spider-Man has money problems and Superman's married, but the whole thing is based in almost complete fantasy.

You can't have that with reality-based stories dealing with love and lust. You need to have real people (even if they're in fiction).

Anyway...

You know, you guys can comment if you want. I know there are a few of you who read this, and I'd like to hear your opinions, whether they're about romance comics or just my crazy ramblings.

And while you're commenting, click on some of those Google ads. Those things add up... 8 cents here, 12 cents there... next thing you know, I'm getting the wife a nice gift!

Wag That Tail!

2005-09-26T19:44:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the long time in between posts. I started a new job today, and I had to spend a lot of time last week doing last-week-of-job things.

Anyway...

If you haven't read this article yet ("The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson), do so right away. If you have any interest at all about comics, specifically the comics industry, it's something that should be very telling about why the standard American comic book industry is dying and the manga industry is thriving.

To sum it up (if you decide not to read it, and if so, shame on you), industries do better when there is a greater selection, regardless of how few the lowest selling product sells. For example (and an example that Anderson uses), Amazon.com and iTunes sell a lot of the top 10 books and albums. A ton of them. But that's not where they make their money. They do so by selling a lot of different titles. While Amazon sells 2 million (a guess) copies of the latest Harry Potter book and counts their money for weeks doing so, they make MORE money selling the bottom 100,000 titles, titles that may sell only 1 or 2 or 3 copies a year.

A lot of comic book stores -- the majority I'd say -- are Short Tail establishments. They sell their copies of Spider-Man and X-Men and Identity Crisis and what not, but if a comic sells only a copy or two an issue, they'll often stop carrying it completely (in fact Diamond Comics, the industry's main distributor, is following suit). It's as if something doesn't make a lot of money, it's not worthwhile, when in fact, those comics and graphic novels that sell only a copy at a time (instead of handfulls) make you mucho dinero over the months and years.

The industry used to be Long Tail. In the 50s, when romance and crime and horror were kings, sales varied widely between the best selling and worst. But companies didn't give up very easily or quickly on low-selling titles, because they knew that there were enough people out there buying them, that a larger and more varied publishing output was good for the industry. Marvel/Atlas of the 50s is a perfect example. They published a lot of titles and they published everything. From romance to sci-fi to cartoon characters to teen humor. And while they weren't the most popular titles on the newsstands, they never felt the need to stop publishing comics. You can't say the same about Fawcett or Quality, both of whom routinely outsold Marvel titles.

Fast-forward 50 years, and the largest and most popular publisher in comics, Marvel, is now your classic Short Tail publisher. Super-heroes, super-heroes, and more super-heroes.

Contrast that with their main competitor, DC, who is a Long Tail kind of place. They publish Cartoon Network titles, Vertigo, Wildstorm, and super-heroes. And while titles like Fables and Y, the Last Man (both excellent, by the way) fall near the bottom of the top 100 (this most recent month, they're 90 and 96), I suspect they make DC a lot of money through their trade paperbacks.

(Same goes for other DC/Vertigo titles that weren't top sellers when they were published on a monthly basis: Sandman, Preacher, and 100 Bullets have done extremely well in the trade format, making many multiples of what they earned when coming out as periodicals.)

And manga (and I group manga as one entity, instead of by individual publishers, which probably isn't really the best thing to do, but, oh well) has an incredibly wide variety of genres out there. Action, sci-fi, humor, romance, etc. And while some likely sell many multiples of others, they're still published, because it's a good business idea. Because if you sell 100,000 copies of your best title and 150,000 copies total of your worst 10 titles, you're a) making the same amount of money and b) entertaining a much larger audience who may come back and buy more of your books.

DC needs to stretch its Tail and add some romance titles. And Marvel needs to grow one.

They Just Grow Up So Fast Nowadays

2005-09-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

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)?

Derby Days

2005-09-18T16:41:00.000-05:00

When I was around 10 years old, I remember seeing my first roller derby match on television. It was amazing. Seeing those men and women spin around the banked track, beating each other to submission, made me want to go out, strap on my own roller skates, and take out my sister.

I don't remember seeing more than a few episodes of it, as it seemed to be a quick and passing fad. At least to me. It was the early 80s, and I had no idea that roller derby was once a really popular spectator sport. (I also had no clue how they scored -- I was too busy watching people fly 10 feet in the air, landing soundly on their behinds.)

From what little I could find out about the original roller derby leagues, it began in the mid-30s as a dance marathon type contest (where couples had to complete a certain number of laps) and then slowly evolved into a game, with a male-female team, a combination of offense and defense. (Check out some history here.)

It seemed that the roller derby hey-day was in the post-War era of the great American boom. People would try anything, it seemed, and there were enough people around (and more coming every day) that niche sports like roller derby could do very well. It straggled on for a few more decades, but sputtered out in the mid-80s. Since then, there seems to have been a few attempts at reviving it (and how can we forget the movies Rollerball [1975] and Rollerball [2002]? Oh, you've forgotten them both? Huh, me too), but they've either all failed or become a very insignigficant blip on the sports scene.

But back in the 40s and 50s, it seems like people actually made a living off of this. This includes Gerry Murray, one of the sports all-time greats. (You can read more about Gerry here and here, and would you believe she had her own hair bows.) This issue of Boy Loves Girl (published by Lev Gleason in December of 1954), features a roller derby story where Murray helps out a fan who loves two things: roller derby and Rick French, a member of Murray's team. (I couldn't find a Rick French listed as a roller derby-ite, so he's likely made up.)

The story and art (both unsigned) are pretty good, although nothing to write home about. There is a happy ending, however, and Gerry is happy to tell us the love-birds married and had three kids, all destined to be roller derby stars.

The cover is the worst part of the comic, though, and really has nothing to do with the story inside (the trouble is between two guys, not two girs). Lev Gleason's late-40s/early-50s romance comics usually has terrific photo and painted covers, but by then (nearing the end of the companies existence), they had resorted to line-drawn ones, and not very good ones at that.

Of course, if you're a roller derby fan (and who isn't?), I'm sure you're fine either way.

This Is Not My Beautiful House

2005-09-15T12:31:00.000-05:00

In my post on manga, a lot of you gave me a little lesson on what I should read, and I greatly appreciated it. A couple of you suggested Maison Ikkoku, by Rumiko Takahashi (also known for her very popular Lum*Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 -- both of which I have read a little of), so I clicked on my Amazon.com link (which you should too) and ordered the first volume. (I also ordered the first Boys Over Flowers, by Yoko Kamio, but more on that later.)

A few things before I get into my evaluation of Maison Ikkoku (and whether or not it's a romance comic). First, I really enjoyed reading it left to right, back to front. It was different, and while I don't know how necessary any of it really is, I liked doing it. I must admit that after reading for a couple of minutes I got a bit queasy and had to put it down. You're used to doing something (reading) one way for your entire life, it's not so easy making the change.

I also didn't mind the size, which is significantly smaller than US comics, and is a complaint I hear about manga, at least the bound, reprinted books. I was able to read everything easily, and I don't feel as if any of the art was blurred by it.

As for the story...

Well, after finishing Maison Ikkoku Vol. 1, I thought to myself, "This is a sitcom, but without the jokes." All of the characters are charicatures. The two love-birds are foils -- the studious house manager and the the flighty tenant. There is the bossy mother with the bratty kid. There is the smarmy and perverted guy who usually only gets a zinger or two in each chapter. And there is the ditzy waitress always there for a drunken pratfall.

But there are no jokes per se. Nothing to make you laugh out loud.

One of the things that I never liked about the romantic television sit-com is that the back and forth between the guy and the girl, the "will they or won't they" gets old really fast. In only 200 some pages of this comic (and it seems like it goes on for over a dozen volumes), I've already lost interest in whether or not the widowed Kyoko and the love-struck Yusaka will ever get smoochy.

Now I want to emphasize that this is not a "I don't like manga" or a "I don't get manga" argument. I do like it (it's comics -- what not to like?), and I do get it (ditto). I just don't really like this.

And is it a romance comic? I don't think so. Although love is there (well, lust and yearning and the hope for love), it's not what the comic is about. Maybe it become more romantic as the comic continues -- I just don't know if I'll be buying any more of the books to find out.

My Romantic Adventures #104

2005-09-14T16:01:00.000-05:00

Class plays a big part of romance comics, just as it seemed to (and still does) in the rest of popular culture. The rich girl, poor guy (or vice versa) scenario dates back to Shakespeare, and probably earlier. Victorian novelists like Dickens and Trollope and Gaskell were all about class and money, as it was an easy, built-in conflict.

So too with romance comics. A wealthy guy comes into town (usually visiting an aunt or uncle for the summer) and falls for the daughter of the town soda jerk. Can their love survive the evil, rich father? Or a gal goes on a summer vacation (usually lasting the ENTIRE summer) and falls for the guy who works at the ranch. Is her family's money and his love for the simple country life a match made in heaven or hell?

This cover (and the first story, "Taxicab Romance") is your typical class story. (Since we're just talking about the cover, however, we'll leave the inside for another time.)

The things I like about this cover are its logo (see previous post about good/bad logos) and its overall composition. The logo is terrific, just as the other 2 ACG romance titles (Lovelorn [later Confessions of the Lovelorn] and the short-lived Search for Love), as the heart around the "My" is a nice touch. As for the composition, well, there are nice things here. The hand gently touching his cheek. The hat pushed to one side. He sitting in the back of the cab, she in the driver's seat. It's well thought out.

The problem, though, is in the execution. The art by John Rosenberger (I think it's Rosenberger) is not his best. If it is Rosenberger, he did a lot of work for Atlas (Marvel) in the 40s and early 50s, and later on did plenty of romance comic art for DC (see my Girls' Romances cover of a couple of posts ago); a lot of it was good.

This seems like it was thrown together one night, fighting a deadline. There is little depth to the characters, and the details are scarce. The coloring, usually bright on most ACG covers, is also very plain.

This was published long past the romance comic's hey-day, and perhaps it was already being pushed to the back as far as time and quality were concerned. It's a shame, because the idea behind it to me seems very cool.

Darling Love #1

2005-09-13T16:06:00.000-05:00

I'm a terrible artist. Not only can't I draw, I can't compose, and I can't design. I'll often picture something in my head for something I want to create (a Web site, for example), and it either comes out completely different than how I wanted it to, or I can't find a way to even comprehend how I wanted it in the first place.

And logos, well, I'm just as bad. I've tried to create them several times, and they've all come out looking like crap.

But while I can't do this stuff myself, I do know a good logo when I see it. In super-hero comics, the Amazing Spider-Man used to have a great logo (not so much now), and the Avengers always had a pretty dumb one. The Superman logo is classic -- simple, yet dynamic.

A lot of romance comics logos are pretty boring. Standard block type is the norm. Sometimes they would go crazy with a cursive script, but not often. But nobody was going out on a limb.

Different type is good. That Western Love cover the other day had a terrible logo. But this Range Romances one? Well, who doesn't like rope and log fonts?

So it goes with Darling Love. Along with Darling Romances, this was one of only two romance titles published by Archie Comics. And while neither lasted particularly long, they had, what I feel, is the best logo in romance comics-dom. I mean, it stood out. It seemed that the designer actually tried to do something different rather than just the same ol', same ol'. And while there are about 3 too many different fonts on this cover, the logo really stands out.

Both of the Darling's (Love and Romance) had a large logo and a photo, with some text running down the left-hand side, and the layout was not award winning. But that big LOVE... Man, it's something.

I'm not sure if that font is made up specifically for the titles or if it was taken from somewhere else, but whoever created it deserves a pat on the back.

(Cover courtesy of this eBay auction.)

Corrections

2005-09-10T10:08:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when I'm writing this, it's on the fly. And the problem is that I make mistakes. Big mistakes. And I hate making mistakes. But if I do, I want to correct them.

Here are some of them:

In this post, I said that Archie and Harvey never made romance comics. I couldn't have been more wrong. Archie had a couple of series (Darling Love, being one of them), but Harvey had a ton, including First Romance, First Love, and High-School Romance, all which lasted more than 50 issues. I don't know how I screwed that one up.
I still haven't read any of the manga I bought, but someone wrote a comment saying that Fruits Baskets is not a romance comic. So I'm sorry about that. And I do promise to read some of this stuff, although I can't promise I'll like it.
When I wrote about the Fox Comics romance titles here, I said that Victor Fox, the owner and publisher, worked for DC before starting out on his own. Well, that's just an old wives' tale. According to the book, Men of Tomorrow (which is excellent, by the way, and highly recommended), a history of the very beginnings of the comic book industry, this is bunk. Fox never worked in the comic book industry before he started up his own company.

That's all the mistakes I know I made -- if I've made some more, please post a comment. I'd much rather be corrected than be wrong.

Western Love #3

2005-09-08T13:20:00.000-05:00

I've talked about Western romance comics a couple of times before (notably here) and I talked about photo covers here, but Western Love #3 seems to meld all of the things that are creepy about the two genres into one. But to me, there are just too many unflattering things going on in this cover, so much so that I have to place it in the "not-so-good" column.

First off, who are we supposed to think that cowgirl is falling in love with? She's sure as heck not smiling at a cowboy. So we're to think that she's smitten with the horse, right? The horse!? Even in the sweet and innocent 40s and 50s you'd have to think something fishy was going on. And that smile. It's just plain creepy.

Now while I don't much care for Westerns (movies, comics, what have you), I do like the Western wear (I have a few spiffy plaid shirts with mother-of-pearl snaps), but this lady is a little over the top, don't you think? Make-up, painted nails, hair done just right. Yeah, that looks like a real cowgirl to me.

And then there's the logo. It's practically half the cover (and even repeated right below the "W" in Western, which I can only assume would be for people to see the title when most of the cover would be obscured on the newsstand), and it's black with yellow trim. It just sits there, not standing out from the crowded competition nor from its own background. In fact, most of the cover text is either the title or selling of the title ("The Original Young Romance Group" and "Big 52-Pages of Real-Life Comics - Don't Take Less" and "True-Life Ranch Romances"), none of which really draw you in.

Luckily, the inside has a story by John Severin and Bill Elder (who also did some great stuff for Prize Western, and, of course, later for EC).

I think this is the biggest problem with photo covers -- they're just there. And I'm not sure if it's there enough for me to have wanted to buy it off at the local newsstand.

Girls' Romances #103 (For Lack of a Better Title)

2005-09-07T15:50:00.000-05:00

To me, the DC romance comics of the 50s and 60s always looked very nice, and I use that word very much as a complement. They had very pretty (but not particularly sexy) women on it, and very handsome men either running after them or hugging them. They were emotive, but only of happiness or sadness: never anger. And they were full of bright, primary colors. Even in night scenes, there was something very alive about the covers.

Like I said, nice. Safe. Pretty.

Then, right around issue #100, something changed. Perhaps there was a new editor (I'll have to snoop around and do some research), perhaps they were just catching up to the mid-60s and realized that not everything still had to have the Donna Reed flair. But whatever it was, the colors began to be more garish (also in a good way), more alive. The dialogue became more rough around the edges. And so did the art. Even though it was still the DC stable of artists (joined by new-to-the-fold John Rosenberger and Gene Colan), everything stopped being so damn perfect. (If you don't believe me, check out the cover gallery over at the Grand Comics Database. Look at the pre-100 and post-100 covers.)

Issue #103 reminds me a bit of the monochromatic covers that Marvel did during that same period (you can check them out here), but the lack of any in-panel shading make it even more outlandish. And the dialogue -- "I never want... to see you again... after what you did to me!" -- is really very harsh. This isn't just an argument between two teenagers. This is something much worse. And she shows it, each panel getting sadder and sadder, more despondent, more depressed. And each color gets harsher -- yellow to orange to red.

Covers are meant to make you want to pick up the comic, and if I were browsing the racks in the summer of 1964, I think I would've picked this one up.

(The GCD attributes this art to Gene Colan, but I don't see it. To me, this is John Rosenberger, who has a similar style as Colan, but without the exaggerated fluidity, and while there is a Colan story on the inside [the cover story, "Too Late for Tears"], even Gene Colan's own Web site says that he didn't do the cover art.)

I Feel Pretty, Oh So Pretty

2005-09-06T16:41:00.000-05:00

I spent a good part of the holiday weekend trying my best to re-design this blog, to make it seem more interesting, more "of the subject". I don't think I did a very good job as I lack any and all ability to design anything that actually looks half decent. It may be because of the way blogs are designed -- the code is CSS (which I don't understand very well), not HTML (which I've been able to teach myself with some success) -- and this lack of knowledge really sent me for a loop.

So in honor of my own lack of artistic ability (and coding skills), for the next few days I'm going to be posting different covers -- good and bad -- and saying why I (the artistic novice) think they're good. This includes layout, logo, art, text -- whatever.

I'll take suggestions, too, if you're so inclined.

Revisionist History

2005-09-04T18:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not a "real" historian in the sense that I never studied history (other than those 4 required classes in college) and I don't really do research for a living (I write boring pharmaceutical documents, whose research is whatever thousand-page tables and graphs they plop down in front of me), but I am an observer of historical research, both inside and outside of the field of comics.

And in both arenas (the large banner of HISTORY and the very small piece of it comics history), there seems to me to be a sense of constantly wanting to discover new things, often times at the expense of accuracy and common sense. And often times it gets to the point that the historical discoveries of someone or something becomes more important than what that someone did or something was. Who Shakespeare was, for example, seems much more important to some than what Shakespeare wrote. Abraham Lincoln being gay is a recent one (or at least recent to my ken), in that several new biographies' successes seem to hinge on proof that Lincoln locked up the wife in the West Wing of the White House not because she was nuts but because he enjoyed the company of men better.

And comics is no different, although sometimes I wonder if our scholarship is based less in the need for new discoveries and more on the need to increase the value of previously non-important comics.

About a decade ago, the Marvel prototype craze hit comicdom. No longer was it good enough to buy the first appearance of The Hulk, that giant, green-skinned thorn in General Ross's hide, but you also had his first first appearance, when he was a hairy gray beast in an early issue of Journey into Mystery. No matter that it really wasn't anything like the super-hero Hulk -- no green skin, no gamma radiation -- the mere fact that they shared the same name and company was good enough for people to yell "prototype" and suddenly a $20 comic was an $80 comic. (Tom Lammers did a terrific job of outlining what was and wasn't -- with even the was group being tenuous -- related to the later Marvel Silver Age heroes in several issues of Alter Ego, beginning with #29.)

Now you're obviously thinking to yourself, "Not romance comics. There were no prototypes of them, were there?" And, to me, the answer is a clear no. To others, however...

Most people (and I'm assuming most who bother to read this blog, even though I haven't directly mentioned it) know that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby produced the first romance comic, Young Romance, which was published in mid-1947 (a September-October cover date). They caught off guard the rest of the comic publishing world so much, they didn't have a competitor (other than their own Young Love) for nearly 2 years, even though it was selling exceptionally well. So you'd think that this would be a slam dunk, then. Cut and dried, Young Romance #1 was the first romance comic.

Well, not entirely, at least for some. Romantic Picture Novelettes showed up on newsstands in 1946 (I'm not sure when, exactly, as it has no specific date on its cover or indicia). Well that sounds like a romance comic, I'm sure you're all saying to yourselves. The cover showed a couple, sitting lakeside, with the fellow leaning in to grab a smooch from his pretty date. And the word "Romantic" is in the title, for crying out loud. But if you look more closely (by that I mean, look on the inside -- and on the blurb in the lower right-hand side of the cover) you'll see that it says "A Complete Mary Worth Adventure".

As some of you may know Mary Worth was (and is) a comic strip, starring a busy-body old woman (Mary Worth, naturally) who's always poking her nose in other people's business. Said business often included the love stuff. (Mary Worth is still being published today, with art by comic veteran Joe Giella. Yes, after nearly 70 years in newspapers, that Mary is still alive and kicking.)

But newspaper reprints have never really been that important to the comic book other than helping start up the format. Comics on Parade, Famous Funnies, et al., were crucial to getting comics on the newsstands, but their content rarely was. The content (at least the most popular) in comic books was original (although quite derivative).

But that hasn't stopped the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide from having Romantic Picture Novelettes as the first "Love Comic. To me, its claim to fame is that it's yet another comic strip reprint that failed on the newsstand. And that's not much of a claim.

Another Overstreet proclamation (and it seems that they are one of the worst in creating dubious comic history) is that My Date was a romance comic. My Date was a Simon and Kirby-produced comic released by Hillman (known mostly for their Airboy title), which was a teen-humor title in the vein of Archie and others of its ilk. It did, however, have a feature in it called "My Date -- Unusual Dates as told to Jean Anne Marten, 'My Date's' famous young people's counselor". The 6-page story (the only issue of the titles I own is #2, so that's all I can talk about with any confidence) featured art by Dan Barry, and while it was about a date and had romance and did end with a peck on the cheek, it was still funny.

Was this a romance story? Sure. Does that mean that My Date was a romance comic? I don't think so. The rest of issue #2 features the cover feature starring Swifty Chase, another starring Violet, an awkward girl who doesn't know the right way to impress her beloved Merril, Ginny, a takeoff on Quality's Candy, and The Rosebud Sisters, "Those 70-Year-Old Teen-Agers".

The first issue of My Date was cover-dated July 1947, a couple of months before the first Young Romance, and while I think that Simon and Kirby certainly had the latter in mind when doing the former, I'm pretty confident in saying that it's not a romance comic. To put it in a super-hero perspective, it's what Challengers of the Unknown is to the Fantastic Four. There are similarities, but one is a sci-fi/adventure series, the other is a super-hero series.

I think it's important that we call things for what they are, and not for what they might be. And Romantic Picture Novelettes and My Date aren't romance comics.

Water Damage

2005-08-31T15:58:00.000-05:00

I made a vow to myself that I wanted this blog to be about romance comics, only romance comics, and not let the real world or my own life get in the way. And while I was the only one to know about this vow, please allow me to break it and talk a bit about what's been happening in the world (specifically the Gulf area of the U.S.) these last few days and try and have it relate to comics.

In September of 1999, I was living in a first-floor apartment in Manville, New Jersey, a town known mostly for its asbestos factory and the numerous deaths and lawsuits that came from it. My apartment looked out onto a park and the small river (a stream, really), the Raritan, that ran through it. It wasn't a great view, by any means, and not a great apartment.

But it didn't much matter because Hurricane Floyd came through on the 16th of that month, dumping inches of rain on the region, saturating the ground. That night, as the hurricane passed, high tide pushed millions of gallons of water from the Atlantic back into the Raritan, making what was just a lot of water into an immense flood. By midnight my apartment had 5 feet of water in it. Half of Manville was submerged. The neighboring town of Bound Brook had it even worse.

Other than my cats, my roommate's computer, and a few boxes of my most valuable comics, I lost everything.

I realize that my plight, as devestating to me as it was (and it was quite devestating), seems to pale in comparison with what's happening in the wake of Katrina, but this week has brought back a lot of really bad images and memories, much of which I'd like to never have to think of again. And while those in Louisiana and Mississippi who lost their lives or whose family members perished have pain worse than I could ever feel, I still feel a great sense of personal empathy with them.

I know what it was like. I saw and felt the muddy, cold water. I did unrealistic things thinking I could save my things, putting myself in harm's way.

The comics I tend to collect, the old ones at least, are for me to read and are not for investment. I don't really mind if they have tears or pieces missing or tape, just as long as they're complete and readable. I don't have the money (nor the urge) to buy pristine copies of things when I could use the same amount of money to buy 20 different copies of comics in lesser condition (I don't begrudge those who look for condition, however, as we all have our peculiarities).

But since 1999, I won't buy a comic with water damage. I won't buy a book with a water stain. If an album sleeve has water-related problems, I'll put it back. When you walk into your apartment and see your things completely water logged, dozens of boxes of comics, numerous bookshelves full of books, hundreds of CDs and records, all which had been under water for 24 hours, you tend to want to avoid that sort of thing, even if the damage is miniscule in comparison.

It also bothered me very much that many of the comics that were destroyed in my flood (I'm very possessive about it) I had had in my collection for 20 years. They were mine. They never had another owner, and if they had survived, they likely wouldn't have had one for many decades to come. They all had a personal history.

That's why when now if I see two copies of the same old comic, same price, same condition, if one has a name written on the cover, I'll take that one. Because some kid (or teen or adult) bought it (or traded for it or had it passed down from an older sibling) and thought enough of it to write their name on it. It's mine. Forever. (And for a kid, forever really isn't that long at all.)

I never wrote my name on my comics (and I never have), and I don't even write my name on the inside of my books (as some people do), but it doesn't bother me at all when I buy a used book or comic that someone had done that to.

It's history.

I feel terrible that the people in the Gulf have lost their personal history, at least their material history. I know it's how I felt when I lost my own.

If you have the means and the urge, please donate to the Red Cross or Operation U.S.A.

Turn Off That TV and Read a Book!

2005-08-29T10:33:00.000-05:00

This blog is something of a continuing research project for me. What I'm going to do with this is unknown (a book? long article? a musical?), but the more that I look at the history of the genre, the more that things tend to not clear themselves up and instead become even murkier.

Take television's relationship to comics, for example. I always assumed (and I think a lot of other people, as well) that the introduction of the TV into more American homes made comic circulation drop. Yet as the number of TVs increased (44,000 in the US in 1947, 2 million by 1949, and more than 23 million by 1953), comic circulation seemed to also surge (Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, the perennial leader, had a monthy total nearing 3 million in 1952, compared with just under 2 million six years earlier).

And I always assumed that television soap operas dragged the housewife (which was romance comics' earliest market) away from the printed page and instead placed her in front of that tiny little screen, causing the first major romance comics purge in the early 50s. Now I'm not so sure.

Soap operas of the 50s were nothing like those of today. The first soap operas were broadcast in 1951 ("Search for Tomorrow" and "Love of Life"), yet they were only 15 minutes long (and didn't expand to a half-hour until '56). I'm not sure if a couple of 15-minute television shows could have that much of an effect on house wives deciding on whether or not to buy a comic book.

Plus, throughout the 30s and 40s (and even well into the TV age), there were many radio soaps that outnumbered their TV counterparts. Why would they have been that much less of an issue, even though there were many more of them?

If you look at the incredibly informative list of romance comics that Dan Stevenson produced, you'll find that nearly 1/4 of all comic titles began and were cancelled before the first television soap opera even aired. Whole companies (like Fox) weren't around to challenge the soaps, and in some cases, other publishers (including Ajax-Farrel and Charlton) produced the majority, if not all, of their work in the post-TV era.

So what was it? Well, I think we've overestimated the number of housewives who bought and read romance comics in the first place. Yes, Young Romance sold extremely well. And yes, Atlas produced dozens of romance comics geared to the housewife in the late-40s that likely helped keep their company afloat. But by the early 50s, well before the TV soap had fully controlled the minds of American woman, it seems obvious to me that they had stopped reading romance comics at the rate at which they first did. Why do I say this? Look at the stories. Comic stories were less about married couples or even girls looking to marry and more about teenagers looking for that first love, first kiss.

Of the popular Simon/Kirby produced comics, which one had the fewest issues published (and never broke that bi-monthy schedule)? Young Brides. And one of the most successful romance comic of the early 50s (at least sales-wise) was Fawcett's Sweethearts, which featured stories mostly of the high-school and slightly older set.

I think we've overestimated the whole housewives thing. Yes, it was there. That is obvious. But its impact on the success of romance comicsmay have been on its earliest period and quickly faded away, replaced by teenage girls, who suddenly had a disposable income and a lot of free time.

Were comics' dominance squeezed out by TV? Probably. Was that the biggest issue? Maybe, although the anti-comics backlash of the mid-50s likely had a lot to do with it, if not more than TV. And what of TV's effect on the romance comic? I don't know, but it's becoming more obvious that it had a lot less to do with than many previously thought.

MJ and Me

2005-08-26T11:44:00.000-05:00

Marvel Comics yesterday announced that they planned on publishing a new Mary Jane comic. They had two previous series in the past two years (the first was an ongoing, cancelled after the fourth issue; the second was scheduled as a 4-issue mini-series), both written by Sean McKeever and drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa, and I bought and enjoyed them both.

I'm not a Spider-Man fan, however. I think he's a pretty interesting character, but when my best friend and I both started collecting comics at the same time many years ago, we each chose certain titles that each of us would collect. Exclusively. So if I chose Daredevil (which I did), he didn't buy Daredevil. He could always read mine and sometimes we traded, but for the most part we stuck with those original choices.

I didn't "get" Spider-Man, and I've never much read him since. Nothing against him. Just wasn't in the cards.

But I had read McKeever's A Waiting Place, and I liked it enough to try Mary Jane, and it seemed as if Marvel was really trying to do something new and different.

Like I said, they were good, if not a little slow moving (although that seems to be happening a lot in comics these days; both 4-issue series would've been shoved into an 8-page story in Love Adventures 50 years prior, but that's not much different from how comics were paced then and now).

So I was excited to see that Marvel had greenlighted a new ongoing series. The sales for Mary Jane had been some of the lowest at the company, and it was good to see them trying to make something work.

But then I saw the new title.

Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane.

The first 2 Mary Jane series (Circle of Friends and Homecoming) had Spider-Man swing through now and again, but he appeared in the comic as much as his alter-ego, Peter Parker, did. Which was very rarely. It was mostly about MJ, Liz Allen, Flash Thompson, and Harry Osborn. And while Mary Jane had a big crush on the web-swinger, it was a secondary storyline to something that seems more real -- the pettiness of high schoolers.

Now, however, it's Spider-Man and Mary Jane. Together. Swinging on the cover, for crying out loud.

Yes, I realize I haven't read it, and yes, the press release said the title was "tentative", but it still seems to me that comic companies (at least the big ones) still feel that all other genres must tie into super-heroes. I talked about it a bit in this entry, and it's something that I expect to see over and over again. Western? No way. Western with cowboy who can shoot beams out of his eyes? You bet! Romance? Pass. Romance where the character falls in love with a super-hero? I want 5 copies!

I suppose Marvel wants this series to be a stepping stone for people who usually don't read their comics to try this and then buy some others, but I'm not sure what else they'd want to buy (certainly not the other teenage girl comics they have out now -- Arana and X-23). Is Mary Jane the obvious predecessor to Spider-Man? I don't think so.

And this is nothing new from Marvel. Patsy Walker, the main character in many a teen-humor comic from the 50s and early 60s (along with her "friend" Hedy Wolfe) became The Cat (and later Hellcat) in the 70s (and married Son of Satan!). What will become of Millie's red-headed rival, Chili? I suppose she'll flame on like the Human Torch.

Genre can still work in and of itself if it it is only allowed the chance. I'm sure of it.

P.S., I Love You

2005-08-24T16:13:00.000-05:00

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?

Love Is Not Funny!

2005-08-23T10:21:00.000-05:00

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.

Put Up Your Dukes

2005-08-22T10:29:00.000-05:00

In my first installment of why I think romance comics (as my mother would say) went the way of all good things, I talked about the idea that the new comic artists and writers coming into the business in the 70s wouldn't enjoy creating love stories. Since nobody made any comments against this assertion, I will assume that everyone agrees with me. (The best way to win any argument is by not having anyone argue with you about it in the first place.)

I kid.

Anyway, another big issue regarding the loss of romance comics is the fact that it wasn't only that romance comics were dropping left and right, but comic companies themselves had (since the mid-50s) begun disappearing at an alarming rate. From '50 to '77, companies that published romance comics that went out of business (or stopped producing comics) included EC, Ziff-Davis, Fawcett, Ace, Star, Superior, ACG, Fox, St. John, Quality, Prize, Avon, Ajax/Farrell, Lev Gleason, Standard, and many more.

By the early 70s, what publishers were left? DC (which absorbed several titles from Quality [Heart Throbs] and Prize [Young Love, Young Romance]), Marvel (which had attempted to revise romance comics with My Love and Our Love, otherwise hadn't produced romance comics since the final issues of Love Romances in 1963), Archie and Harvey (which never produced romance comics to begin with), Atlas (a short-lived publisher with only one romance title, the magazine Gothic Romances), Charlton (which had around 6 romance titles going up until the 70s), and Dell/Gold Key/Western (which had no romance titles). (If I'm forgetting something, which I probably am, please remind me.)

So you went from a time 15-20 years earlier, when there were dozens of publishers putting out anywhere from 15-30 (or more) romance titles a month, to three publishers with around a half-dozen titles coming out any one month. This is against 40-50 super-hero titles, a dozen teen humor series, plus the latest cartoon/TV comics, etc.

(Also of note, none of these now-defunct publishers stopped publishing romance comics before they went out of business. They were all just part of their larger line that stopped publishing altogether.)

The comic publishers that survived into the 70s were mostly of two ilks -- they were super-hero/horror/sci-fi publishers (Marvel and DC) or they were specialty publishers (Archie, Harvey, Gold Key). There really wasn't anything out there any more that mirrored the publishers of the 50s, which would have many different titles with many different genres. And because of that, niche genres (like romance or war or western) got squeezed out. The fewer the number of titles published in a certain genre, the smaller the market, the smaller the number of people who were aware of them, the fewer the number of people who would buy them.

I really think that there could have been a market for these titles. Westerns could've thrived or horror (which mostly disappeared by the late 70s) or romance. But they just weren't there. There weren't enough to challenge the dominating super-hero titles.

The same goes today. It's difficult to get a genre in edgewise, when all you're seeing on the stands are spandex-clad do-gooders. Yes, there are tons of non-super-hero comics out there, but go to most comic shops, and they're pushed off to the side, outcasts. Unloved.

So to sum up, that's my second key to why romance comics failed: they didn't have a fighting chance.

No Crying Here, People!

2005-08-19T11:04:00.000-05:00

About a year ago, Fantagraphics released a book reprinting about a dozen St. John romance comics called Romance Without Tears. It is one of the few books that reprint romance stories exclusively (the other two are True Love, which reprinted various early Simon & Kirby stories, and Heart Throbs, which reprinted stories by DC); both are long out of print.

This is a very solid book, and I'm impressed with its scholarship (a well-researched introduction and accurate artist attributions) and its format. The stories are scanned directly from the original comics, so the art isn't crystal clear. But they are very readable -- along the lines of having a 50-year-old comic.

It's highly recommended.

A few thoughts on this book (specifically) and romance comics (in general).

The editor, John Benson, writes an interesting introduction, where he talks a lot about the writer of these stories, a man named Dana Dutch, someone whom I never heard of before. (That's not uncommon, however, as finding out the writer of old comics is no easy task -- they were hardly, if ever, listed.) Benson really admired Dutch's style, and he goes to great length comparing how the St. John stories have a much stronger protagonist than other comics of the time, and that the conclusion of these stories doesn't always revolve around the woman either a) getting the man of her dreams and being happy or b) not getting the man and walking away in tears, alone, not a whole woman.

I'm not sure if I agree wholehartedly with this assessment, as Benson seems to be selling some of the other writers short. Were there many stories whose basis is all on the woman trying to attain the "ideal" of the perfect 50s housewife and if this ideal isn't reached, it is only because of the failure of the woman? Of course. Was it as widespread as he states? I don't think so. (He writes, "At some companies, there was not a single story in which the heroine didn't feel overwhelming guilt.")

But it will make me look at that more closely, to see how often this occurred.

I do agree with him that the Dutch-written stories are more mature, but I think most of the earliest romance comics had a similar bent. The shift to telling stories about teen-agers instead of those in the early-20s or already married started to happen around '52 or '53, and many of the early romance comics had the women in positions to not just fall for the right fellow but to also want to marry them. (I wasn't able to find it when I looked yesterday, but I have a St. John issue -- Pictorial Romances #20 -- that has a story about a brothel! That's certainly pretty mature!)

One of the most popular artists of St. John' (and others) was Matt Baker, and he does the art in 11 of the book's 15 stories. Someone should really do a biography on him, as he stands out as a very important person in the history of comics. First of, he was one of the few (and possibly only) black artists working in comics then (and really, up until the 90s, there was only a handful of African-Americans working in comic). Also, at his peak, he was drawing some of the sexiest women in comics, whether it was in romance titles for St. John or Atlas or the Phantom Lady for Fox. By the mid-50s, however, it seems his career wasn't all it had been, and he was working in the Vince Colletta studios, churning out page after page, much of which lacked the spark of his early work. He died very young (in 1957 at age 34).

And Archer St. John, the founder and publisher, is an interesting character, whose story is briefly mentioned in the introduction, and he merits a more thorough biography (and if he's had one already, I can't find it anywhere).

I'm somewhat disappointed in the exclusion of Ric Estrada from Romance Without Tears. His art, while not as glamorous as Baker's, is solid, and his women were drawn very well. (Estrada also drew some of the last romance comics for DC in the late 70s.) The only thing I could think of this omission is that he didn't draw Dutch's stories, and instead worked with a different writer.

Benson and Fantagraphics have put together a terrific book, with solid examples from some of the best comics, not just romance comics, of the late 40s/early 50s. Go out and buy yourself a copy, won't you?

Fancy Dress

2005-08-18T14:44:00.000-05:00

I like all kind of comics, not just romance ones. The first comics I read were super-hero, and I still read a lot of them today. At their best, they're very entertaining. Challenging, even. At their worst, they are juvenile or just plain boring.

But, for the most part, that's what we have with comic books today. While there are many publishers out there that don't touch the super-hero genre with a ten-foot pole, the two biggest (Marvel and DC) publish dozens of titles each month featuring your favorite costumed crime-fighter.

And super-heroes (likely because that's all that are out there) seeped into other genres. You don't publish a Western any more. You publish a Western with people who can shoot ray-beams out their eyes. You don't publish a sci-fi comic. You publish a sci-fi comic that has some bizarre, and likely dubious, tangental relationship with super-heroes of the past.

And you can't publish a romance comic without there being something involving super-heroes. (DC had a series out a few years ago called Young Heroes in Love. It wasn't particularly good. Even Marvel's recent Mary Jane series -- which I enjoyed -- had to have Spider-Man in them. A real shame.)

So it's not unexpected to find a series like Love in Tights, which ran (as best I can determine) 6 issues, from late 1998 to 2000. The anthology was edited by J. Torres, who's gone on to do a lot of work for DC and others, including some of their underrated Johnny DC titles, and assistant edited by B. Clay Moore (who's also gone on to bigger things comics-wise, including writing Hawaiian Dick).

I bought the first two issues at the recent Wizard World Chicago convention, and I sat down last night to read them. Anthologies are a tough sell, because often times one really bad story can ruin an entire book, and if there isn't a focused direction to be found, things can go awry rather quickly.

That's sort of what happened with issue #1. There are 4 short stories in the issue, and a few 1-page gags, but none of them are very fulfilling. The best of the bunch is Takeshi Miyazawa's "Crash Course", a story where two young lovers get accosted by a group of thugs, and while the boy faints from the pressure, the gal shows off her super-powers and beats the bad guys to a pulp. The art's solid, the story's okay (if not a little thin), but it seems like there's a lot missing. The other stories are very much slice-of-life tales involving either falling in love with a super-hero (J. Torres and Francis Manapul's "While You Were Sleeping") or being a super-hero and falling in love (Torres, B. Clay Moore, and Brian Clopper's "Fatal Hesitation" and Justin Steiner and Rick Cortes's "Fast Girl"). But they're not really stories. There is no progression; there is no plot. Things just happen, someone is heart-broken, and then everything ends.

With romance stories (I think much more than with action ones), there must be an emotional resonance. It's much more important to feel what the characters feel, show some sort of empathy, than just have a little twist ending. Nothing in Love in Tights #1 did that.

(And look, I'm not sure if I ever feel much empathy for the girls in Young Romance or True War Romance. But it would be nice if it came close.)

The second issue, however, was a big improvement. Of the five stories in the issue, only "The Caped and the Cowled", a soap-opera spoof, really dropped the ball. Perhaps it was because two of the stories were done with established characters (Randy Renaldo's "The Real Julianne Love", featuring the Rob Hanes Adventures cast, and Steve Conley's "Made for Each Other", featuring Astounding Space Thrills' Argosy Smith). But more than not, they're romance stories (which feature deception, hope, love at first sight) with just a touch of super-heroics.

The last story is "Another Perfect Wedding" by Randy Lander and Steve Remen, a take on the super-hero wedding which we've seen a lot in "serious" super-hero comics, but it works here on funny level (although not much love).

If the second issue was on par with the first, I doubt if I would've looked for the other 4, but as it is, I'll search out and try to find them. I noticed that a couple have covers and stories by Andi Watson (who I really like), so that's certainly an incentive. I think Torres quickly realized that the best romance stories involving super-heroes are better off featuring love than tights.

What Does John Johnson Have to Do with Comics?

2005-08-16T10:21:00.000-05:00

John Johnson, the founder and publisher of Jet and Ebony magazines (among others), died last week. He was a pioneer in many ways, mostly in changing the way that Americans looked at sucessful African Americans (athletes, entertainers, etc.), but also in creating a product aimed at a black audience in a time when, even in the more "civilized" North, they were looked on as being less than whites, and not having as great of an economic importance.

I think we take niche markets for granted. I mean, go to any Borders bookstore and you'll see hundreds of magazines, from the obvious Time and Newsweek, to "extreme" sports like Thrasher's skateboarding, to Modern Ferret. MODERN FERRET!

But when Johnson started Negro Digest in 1942, Ebony in 1945, and Jet in 1951, these were revelations. (Of course, these weren't the first magazines aimed at a black audience; they were just the most successful. Also, I'm not trying to argue that being black is "niche" in any way; I'm merely trying to say that in the 30s and 40s, marketing to blacks was likely not where companies would think to see a lot of money coming their way.)

Comic publishers, while not as daring to initiate this on their own, looked at the successes of these and other magazines, and like they were so apt to do, copied them. As I mentioned before, if Westerns were popular in the movies or on the radio, well Western comics should be published. And if romance comics were popular, then combine them with the Westerns, dammit!

Publishers saw the sales figures from the other publishers. They saw how many were being distributed, how they were selling, where they were selling, and they knew that if someone was doing well with a new type of magazine, they had better copy it and put out something of their own just like it. (In comics, look at Mad. How long after Mad came out did you see dozens of other titles on the stands: Eh, Crazy, Flip, and even a copy-cat from the same publisher [EC], Panic.)

So it's not surprising that Fawcett (one of the largest magazine, book, and comic publishers in the country) saw those Ebony sales figures, then looked at their romance comic and confessions magazines sales figures, and some editor said, "Negro Romance, people! Stat!" Three bi-monthly issues were produced, the first cover dated 6/50. (A fourth issue, published by Charlton in 1955, was a reprint of Fawcett's second issue.) Although I don't have sales figures from this series, I suspect it didn't do well for numerous reasons.

At the time, the romance deluge was in full force, and there was likely 20-30 romance titles being published that month. That's a staggering amount, considering that only two years prior, there were at most 3 titles being published at any given time. And when faced with that number of titles, magazine sellers often didn't even bother to put out many of the comics. They'd merely lop the top third of the cover and return it for credit.

Another reason is having the word "Negro" in the title. Remember, this was the 50s. I can picture many men, opening up their comic bundles, seeing Negro Romances, and simply refusing to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised that the distributor did the same thing and not even bother to send it out to the newsstands.

I'm not sure what problems Johnson had in getting Ebony and Jet on the newsstands (although I'm sure they were plenty), but he obviously had much more perserverance than Fawcett. And it paid off for him quite nicely.

But those four issues of Negro Romances were it for many years, even when it came to having black characters in romance comics (I'm not talking about titles or covers -- I'm talking about even having characters in the stories being black). In fact, I'm not sure if I remember any African-Americans showing up in stories, period, until the late-60s.

Makes you respect people like Johnson more than ever.

(And don't worry, I'll be talking about Jack Kirby's Soul Love in the not too distant future.)

First and Last Kiss

2005-08-15T10:26:00.000-05:00

A few people have asked me what I think about John Lustig's Last Kiss comics.

For those of you who don't know, Last Kiss comics are a grouping of panels that came from Charlton's First Kiss series, with new dialogue. (Lustig acquired the rights to the 40-issue series in 1987.) The art is usually by Vince Colletta (and his assistants) or Dick Giordano, although a few other artists sneak in there from time to time. I've railed on Charlton comics in the past (here and here and I'll likely do some more in the future), but if I've been hard on them, it's not to disrespect the creators in any way. Charlton was notorious for paying the worst page rate in the industry, and many artists and writers have said that when you're getting paid half the rate from what you get elsewhere, you tend to do half the work.

I can't blame them.

Anyway, back to Last Kiss.

I first saw Last Kiss in an issue of the Comics Buyers' Guide, then a weekly newspaper, sometime in the early-90s. I wasn't a fan of romance comics at the time, but I still read the one- or two-panel strips each issue and enjoyed them quite a bit. Things changed, however, once I started collecting romance comics and even moreso once I became a romance comics nutcase.

I've noticed that the more passionate someone gets about something (a cause, a belief, a collectible), the less likely they're willing to joke about it. Say you're friends with a vegan. I suggest not to make too make steak tar-tar comments, even in jest. Your best friend collects beer cans. Try not to joke that you're taking them all to the recycling center. You're dating someone willing to chain themselves to an abortion clinic? I recommend you not forward that RU-486 joke you got from a co-worker. (Okay... that may be a little far fetched, but you get the idea.)

Same goes with me. Since I really enjoy romance comics, I don't really like making fun of them. And, really, they're easy to make fun of. They're dated and silly -- easy targets. And, to me, jokes against easy targets get old really quickly. (To me, "George Bush is stupid" jokes got old right about 3 minutes after I heard my first one. Not because I think a certain way about his intelligence, however, but because that sort of thing gets old real fast. Give me something new, people!)

So while the first couple of Last Kiss comics were witty and humerous, they quickly became repetitive and not very funny. And yes, I realize that I sound like a romance comics snob. And yes, I understand that defending this sort of thing looks pretty silly. But indulge me.

I still get a new comic strip sent to my e-mail Inbox every week, and I always read it, but I try my damnest not to enjoy it (and if I do laugh, I quickly remind myself that romance comics are too important to make fun of).

Don't you think?

Now have you heard the one about the vegan with the beer can collection?

Stop crying, woman, and get up off the ground!

2005-08-12T13:26:00.000-05:00

My favorite romance comics publisher, by far, is DC, especially those published between 1955-1965.

While Alex Toth's Standard stories are what I consider to the best, and Matt Baker's St. John's the sexiest, the DC stories were the most consistent.

DC (publishing under its Signal imprint, most likely to differentiate it from the super-hero, western, and sci-fi titles that made up the majority of its outout) released its first romance comic in late '49 (Girls' Love Stories), and followed-up in the next year with Romance Trail (which had some nice Toth stories), Secret Hearts, and Girls' Romances. What made the DC issues stand apart from the competition was twofold. One, the art was extremely clean and professional. Artists such as Bernard Sachs, Alex Toth, John Romita, Gil Kane, and others graced their pages, and the panels and pages are less crowded. The other is that the dialogue and expositional text is much less than in other publishers' comics. While some (especially the Joe Simon-edited Young Romance family of books) laid it on pretty thick, the DC issues used it much more sparingly.

I think it's effective.

DC titles also had what I like to call the "inner monologue" story, usually about one every issue. In these stories, the girl usually goes on for page after page with tons of self doubt: Is this the right thing to do? Is he the right guy? Am I really in love or is it something else?

In Girls' Romances #42, the final story, "Three Minutes to Heartbreak!" (also on the cover), tells the story of a girl (Denise, although mostly referred to as "darling") who waits with her boyfriend Brian at a bus station (the three minutes refer to the time she spends hugging him before the bus is scheduled to leave). He has to go to "the coast", where all the good jobs are, but she's sure that once he leaves, he's never coming back. In the 8-page story, Brians speaks only a handful of times, and when he does, it's the sappiest, saccharin sweet stuff you'd ever read. While walking along the beach he says, "It's hard to believe that half a world lies on the other side of that ocean!" Watching planes take off (you can tell he's a cheap date), he says, "I wish I were up there in that plane with you, Denise -- going somehwere -- anywhere -- as long as it's with you!"

Denise's dialogue isn't much better.

"I've never seen such dark eyes! They're like dark worlds! Wonderful dark worlds!" or "It's one minute to five... Only one minute before he leaves me... Forever! One minute... just one minute more with him... and then... and then... a lifetime of emptiness!"

Blech.

So, as they hear the last call for the bus, they kiss, and Brian walks away. As the bus pulls away, and Denise nearly has to hold herself back from throwing her body in front of it, she catches a heel in a grate (she first met Brian when she caught her heel in an elevator's stair), and nearly falls.

But no, Brian, who didn't get on that bus after all, is there to catch her.

"I can't go anywhere without you, darling! And as long as you wear those shoes, it looks as if you'll never be able to go anywhere without me, either!"

Double blech.

I guess if you're a woman in the world of DC romance, your mind if full of nothing but doubt and sadness. And tears. Always tears.

While many romance comics feature someone crying on the cover, the tear:cover ratio with DC is staggering. And not only that, but the women, like in the cover to Heart Throbs #90, will often throw themselves on the ground!

Doubt and sadness, indeed. I mean, I'm not a woman, but I know quite a few (the wife included), and I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who's THROWN THEMSELVES ON THE GROUND BECAUSE THEY'RE SO SAD! (If you have, please tell me.)

By the mid-60s, DC and Charlton were really the only games in town romance-wise (ACG had a title or two), and many of the artists that had done work for the now shrunk Atlas had moved over to DC, including John Rosenberger, Mike Sekowsky, Gene Colan, and Jay Scott Pike. DC also continued publishing several titles that other companies had cancelled (such as Young Romance and Young Love from Prize and Heart Throbs from Quality). When everyone else was contracting, DC was expanding.

And even though DC had little or no competition, they still were publishing good titles, with good artists (and sappy writers).

And tears. Lots and lots of tears.

Manga for Me! Manga for You!

2005-08-11T09:42:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of people in the US or Canada or the UK who read comics who hate manga. They despise it, mostly, I think, because it's not what they're used to. It's not men in spandex and women with huge boobs. It's nothing like what they grew up with or expect comics to be.

Manga is the Japanese word for comics (and, for our purpose here, I speak of them as either comics created in Japan or, increasingly, inspired by it). There are plenty of defenders of manga who say that comics are very popular in Japan, that everyone reads it, not just the post-pubescent males that dominate the US market. They also have to constantly challenge the notion (just like American comics are all super-heroes) that manga isn't only giant robots (mecha) or stuff for kids (ie, Pokemon, Dragonball).

I don't hate manga; I just haven't read enough of it.

When translated manga first started making its way to the US in the late-80s (Lone Wolf and Cub, Area 88, Mai, the Psychic Girl, et al.), I read it all. As I mentioned before, I worked in a comic book store, so I had the time and discount to read whatever I wanted. Slowly, Viz (which was doing much of the packaging and translating of the comics) went out on its own and started to publish English-editions on their own, and I bought much of that (especially Ranma 1/2, Lum, and Nausicaa).

By the time I went to college, however, I didn't have the a) disposable income or b) time to read these comics, and I stuck with those that I had either grown up on (standard super-hero stuff) or the indie comics that I thought would make me seem less geeky ("Sure I read comics, but look at this stuff by Dan Clowes!"). I stopped buying manga.

I picked up a few titles here and there (I bought Eagle, the Making of an Asian-American President, and thought it was one of the dumbest things I've read, and I bought the Astro Boy and Lone Wolf and Cub reprints from Dark Horse), but I missed out on the manga boom, which seemed to have started around the time of the influx of anime on TV (from Sailor Moon, Pokemon, and Dragonball) and has only gotten bigger.

I go into Borders and I see a couple of shelves of "standard" US trade paperbacks and graphic novels next to piles and piles of manga reprints, with teenagers (many of them girls) all sitting down reading them. Bookscan (which is like the Billboard of books) notes that in most months, manga titles are 8 or 9 out of the top 10 graphic novels sold.

They're everywhere.

But I don't know where to start. It seems obvious to me that manga is the new romance comic. That what teenage girls were reading in the 50s (romance comics) are now manga.

So that's where you come in. There has to be one or two of you out there who read manga or know about manga that can tell me where to start. Is Fruits Basket a romance comic? Boys Over Flowers? Are these standard romance comics, or are they more along the lines of teen-humor titles like Archie or Pasty and Hedy?

I've never asked for your help before (nor have I even asked for comments, even though I really would like to see a few now and then, to know that people are actually reading this), but I come to you today.

Enlighten me. Educate me.

Booty

2005-08-09T15:50:00.000-05:00

I observed a couple of interesting things during my trek around the Wizard World Chicago convention this past weekend. One was that it wasn't nearly as crowded as in years past, which made me pretty happy. Not because I wish financial ruin on Wizard, but because it made for easier maneuvering and less jockeying at the dealer tables. There's nothing I like less than being elbowed out of the way of the 50-cent and dollar bins. It also meant that there were less customers spending money, which meant the dealers dropped their prices so they could move product. By Sunday morning, there were deals-a-plenty, and being as I'm the second or third cheapest man in the country, this made my weekend.

Another was that I saw more non-comic dealers at the show than ever before, which I don't much care for. Comic book-related toys and other merchandise doesn't much interest me, and there were stretches of the con that had nothing but cards or gaming or swords (yes, swords), and I just passed them by.

For my personal purchases, one funny thing happened. As I was digging through a long box Friday afternoon, I came upon a comic and thought to myself, "This would be a good thing to talk about on my blog." So feel good, people (all 3 or 4 of you who read this), because I was spending money on your behalf!

The comic in question was Lovers #34, and the reason I bought it was because it was a Canadian version. Several publishers, Atlas (Marvel), EC, and Quality to name just three, had their comics printed and sold in Canada, often times under the Bell Publisher head.

They featured stories originally published in the US, although not always in the corresponding American issues (for example, the Canadian Lovers #34 is actually the American Lovers #35). Of course, as Timely-Atlas historial Michael Vassallo has said, "And just because the Canadian has a #31 does not mean that there is a #1-30."

There was no rhyme or reason behind the numbering or even for why they published certain issues and not others. The issues usually featured substandard printing (think mid-60s Charlton), with many of the ads altered, just so nobody from Flin Flon, Manitoba, would be able to send away to get something that only those south of the border were supposed to.

(A very good overall history of Canadian comics by historian John Bell was published in a recent issue of Alter Ego.)

For the most part, I try to avoid Canadian titles. All the stories (I believe) were already published in the American versions, and while some of the titles are pretty silly and esoteric (Moonlight Romance, for example), they're not something I'm going to actively search for.

For this blog, however, and my many nameless readers, I'll do just about anything.

Another book I got was Great Lover Romances #7 by Toby Press. Toby was a small outfit, not publishing much more than 3 or 4 comics a month (they were eventually bought out by Charlton, along with other companies that stopped publishing comics, ie, Fawcett), and Great Lover was their only entry to the romance comics scene. The cover (and one story) is by Ben Brown (not to be confused with Bob Brown) and Dave Gantz, a team that also did a lot of work for Atlas.

The best story in the issue, however, is "Momism or Me", a story about how a mother tries to keep her son at home and away from the girl that has stolen his heart. There are two great scenes -- one is when Clem (the son) tells Vicky that he loves her just as a blue jay is devouring a worm (romantic, eh?). The other is how their house cat knocks over a oil lamp, setting the house on fire, nearly killing Mother (of course Clem saves her). In the end, Mother realizes how she should never let anything come between she and her son and the woman he loves. Sometimes it takes a cat and a burning house to teach an old woman what love really is.

I picked up a few other books, a couple of Atlas titles, some Fawcetts, one or two DC books, but nothing else that exciting. I noticed, however, that when I gave the comics to the vendors to add them up, they always would stop and look at the romance titles, and they'd often comment about how cool they looked.

They do look cool, don't they?

One last thing: there were an abunance of Charltons at the con, many of which were in the cheap-y bins ($1 or $2 each), and while I needed many of them, I couldn't get myself to buy them. I've mentioned this before, but I don't like them very much. The stories and art were sup-par and the printing was terrible. Charlton comics remind me of the rock band Chicago. Every time you turn on the radio (go to a convention), you're innundated with a song (comic) from one of their seemingly 100-plus albums (titles), and while, yes, I admit that they are a form of music (comic), it's nothing that I really want to listen to (read) ever again.

Buy, Buy, Buy, Buy, Buy

2005-08-05T07:56:00.000-05:00

Today begins the Wizard World Chicago comic convention, one of a few I go to every year (I'll also attend the Chicago ComicFest in the Spring, and I put on my own con twice a year, the Chicago Comic Book Marketplace, although I rarely actually get to go shopping at that, I'm too busy running around figuring out how much money I'm losing).

I attend these shows for two reasons: 1) to meet up with friends who I haven't seen since the last con, have some lunch, a few beers, talk about Wonder Woman, whatnot , and 2) to buy comics.

All kinds of comics.

(It also gives the wife a few days without me, which I'm sure she appreciates.)

For the sake of the theme of this blog, however, I'll focus on the lovey-dovey comics.

By one person's count, nearly 6,000 romance comics were published in from 1947-1980. I have around 600. There are a lot I still don't have, obviously, and conventions (along with eBay) are the best places to find them. Since there are so many to choose from and my pockets aren't bottomless, I usually have a few guidelines of choosing what to buy.

Price: I'm cheap, and if I can get a pile of comics for $2-$3 each, I'm very happy to walk away with a pile of them.
Unusualness: I have a ton of Atlas, DC, Fawcett, Quality, Harvey and ACG romance titles. I have very few from Toby, Superior, Star, Fox, and many others that may have had only one or two titles. If it's a choice between another Falling in Love or some title I've never seen before, Falling in Love goes back in the box.
Charlton: There were many great writers and artists who worked on Charlton comics. Steve Ditko, Dick Giordano, Pete Morisi, etc. Unfortunately, most of them didn't do their best work for them, and the stories are terrible. Slap-dash art (with what they were paying, I couldn't blame them), boring writing, bad printing. Put it together, and you have a not-so-hot comic book company, and since I already have dozens of Charlton books from the 50s to the 80s, I'll pass up most any one unless they're just willing to throw it in my stack for free.
Original art: I have a few pages and stories of original art (much from Standard Comics, as those pages seem to have survived more than others), and in many cases, I don't have the coresponding issue. For those that I'm missing, I'd gladly pay a little over my budgeted amount. Also, if someone's selling some romance original art and the price is right, I'll maybe pick up a page or two.

So that's it. I'll be heading out shortly for the convention, want list in hand, hoping to snag something good. On Sunday, I'll scan some of the best in and show you (show and tell is the best part of buying old comics, I think).

Complete Love

2005-08-03T09:12:00.000-05:00

My birthday was last week, and the wife, who puts up with my comic book hobby like the trouper she is, got for me Jamie Hernandez's Locas and Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar, two massive books that collect all of the Love and Rockets stories by the brothers (missing are those by the third Hernandez, Mario, who didn't do much with the comic after the first couple of issues and a recent multi-part story in Love and Rockets volume 2).

I mentioned earlier that the modern independant comic is the closest current type of publication to romance comics of old, and of all those that are being published now or in the recent past, the Hernandez brothers' work is by far the best.

In the mid-80s, I was working at a comic book store in Bethlehem, PA (Dreamscape Comics -- it's still there) and buying nearly everything I could get my hands on. It was the beginning of the black-and-white boom and new series and publishers were popping up daily. Of course, the number compared with today is miniscule, but at the time, it was a very exciting thing. First, Comico, Capitol (briefly), Mirage, Dark Horse, etc., were putting out new and different material, much of which was mediocre, but some which was outstanding (Concrete, Grendel, Nexus, to name a few).

Fantagraphics had been around for a while, primarily as the publisher of The Comics Journal, the still-running comic criticism magazine, but they had recently started to release more comics of their own. I loved Jan Strnad and Dennis Fujitake's Dalgoda, Peter Bagge's Neat Stuff, and at a time when comic strip reprints were at their peak, they published nice volumes of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant and Walt Kelly's Pogo.

I was able to get my older sister to read a few comics as well, most notably Elfquest, and when she stopped in the store one day with her friends, she bought an issue of Love and Rockets (most likely in the early teens). I had tried to read it previously, but most of the stories seemed to be about girls -- tough girls, whether they were Maggie and Hopey living in Los Angeles or Luba and her family living in Mexico -- and I just didn't see the appeal in them. A year or so later, I went back and read the first few issues (reprinted in Love and Rockets Vol. 1), and I was hooked. Maybe it was that I was older; maybe it was because I just was stupid and didn't "get it" the first time. Whatever the reason, I got it now.

Initially, I favored Jamie's stories. They were much more... real. They dealt with people who I think I may one day meet; kids who liked punk music, drank too much, screwed around. (I was much too afraid to do any of these things, but I wanted to know the people who did.) It took me a while longer to get into Gilbert's, which at first read were more complicated, more morose, more about being an adult.

I like them equally now, albeit for different reasons. Maggie and Hopey (and their friends) have grown up with me. They age (not as fast, it seems, as I am), and their lives have changed. They're no longer best friends, and their relationship has had its ups (and way ups) and downs (and way downs). Nearly all of the stories are about love -- unrequited, messed-up, complicated love. And, like the romance comics of old, there usually is some kind of message to be gleaned, an "I-told-you-so" moment much more subtle than in True War Romance.

Palomar focuses on Luba, a gigantic breasted Mexican woman, her husband (scarred in a fire), her children, her village, her past. It's profoundly sad at times, and uplifting at others, and the complex weaving of various times, places, and characters make for a compelling read.

This is the true evolution of the romance comic. From 8-page story. To the subplot of a super-hero's life. To 8-page underground comix story. To Love and Rockets. (Note, there are some pretty huge jumps between these, but take my word for it.)

If you haven't read these stories before, do so. If you already have, buy these books and read them again.

They're worth it.

I'm Serious!

2005-08-02T14:22:00.000-05:00

Although nobody has commented on this (hell, nobody, except for the wife, has commented at all), I'm sure there are some of you readers out there who think that I don't really like romance comics, that it's all just a kitsch thing, that it's just one person's attempt to look hipper-than-thou by grasping at some quirky part of a quirky hobby.

To that, I say hogwash.

I really do like -- no, LOVE romance comics. I think that, beyond their silly stories and dialogue, they are full of a real sense of what the by-gone era was all about, another forgotten part of our past. These stories represent real people, real situations. Sure, they're hammed up and placed in some odd settings, and many of the characters are more ideals than real, but they give you a feel of what the 50s and 60s were about.

A very good friend of mine brought a book to college my freshman year -- The Facts of Love and Life for Teenagers, by Evelyn Millis Duval. Written in 1950 (and revised for paperback later in the decade), this gives the teenager (and older) a how-to for dating, grooming, and *gasp* petting.

It was a great book. Funny, because it was so outdated; silly, because, we figured, even then kids and teens didn't actually talk and behave like that. (My favorite passage was when she described the best way to cool down a petting session so it doesn't go too far. Her advice? Ask your partner to slide on to the other side of the car seat and go get a hamburger.)

I've since collected a lot of these types of books, and while they're great, none have compared with Ms. Duvall's classic (or even her 1965 follow-up, Why Wait Till Marriage?).

Romance comics are for the most part etiquitte lessons in story form. All the how-to's and do's and don'ts are there, and you can learn from the mistakes of the guys and gals in the stories. Aren't sure if it would be a good idea to date a few guys and take advantage of their good graces all at the same time? Well, Teen-Age Romances will give you plenty of reasons not to.

So, I really do like them. My collection numbers around 500, and I've read nearly all of them (the ones I haven't are always on the top of the ever-expanding "to read" pile). And, to my wife's dismay, I'm going to buy and read more of them. And, to your dismay, I'm going to keep on writing about them, too.

Love That Comes Right at You!

2005-08-01T11:23:00.000-05:00

I hate 3-D movies.

Having worn glasses most of my life (save for a few years where I thought the only way to impress a lady was to be sans specs), the cumbersome 3-D glasses were a gigantic pain in the ass, and I was never really able to see the the effects up on the screen. While others would back away as the deadly monster came running toward the camera, I merely sat there and tried to not get a headache.

According to this site, the big 3-D movie craze began in 1952 with Bwana Devil (an Oscar snub like no other). The next year, 27 3-D movies were released (the most famous being House of Wax), and in 1954, 16 were made. By '55, the fad had blown over, and only 1 (Revenge of the Creature) was released. (I remember watching that film on WPIX Channel 11 out of New York some time in the early-80s; you had to pick up the glasses at local Burger Kings.)

Not to be outdone, comic publishers went 3-D nuts. In 1953, several dozen were published, including several great comics from St. John's featuring Joe Kubert art, and in 1954 EC joined the ranks with two comics featuring 3-D versions of some of their already published stores. (Ray Zone has a great Web site explaining this whole phenomenon, and he was also instrumental in the 80s 3-D comics revival.)

There were a couple of 3-D romance comics -- 3-D Love and 3-D Romance, both put out by Steriographic Publications, with art by the team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. (I have a copy of 3-D Love, a gift from the wife, natch. It's an average comic, but the claim that it "the ageless story of love in a new dimension" makes it worth the read (or, in my case, trying to read -- just like movies, my eyes and brain don't really "get" the whole 3-D thing).

The 3-D process was expensive, however, and having to include those cardboard glasses in every copy surely put a crimp in profits, even considering the comics were usually 25 cents instead of the then 10. After '54, there were no 3-D comics published until the '80s (and more to the point of this blog and this ever-expanding entry, no more 3-D romance comics).

ACG had a different idea when it came to 3-D, however. Beginning in on of its horror titles, Adventures into the Unknown, they featured something called "TrueVision", a technique where each panel in the comic would have something extend beyond its border, giving it the feel of three dimensions, but in color and, as the cover bragged, "no glasses."

There were only a handful of TrueVision comics published by ACG, including three issues of Lovelorn. I have only one of them; they're pretty collectible and very expensive (my copy was the most I've ever spent on a romance comic, and likely the most I ever will).

But while the effect on horror or war stories may have been exciting, with romance it was pretty boring. I mean, do you really want the kiss to come right at you? (The lone TrueVision story in Lovelorn #49 features circus performers who fall in love, get injured, think they're going to lose one another, get better, and live happily ever after. Sweet, eh?)

A typical panel shows something -- in the case here hair or tree branches -- breaking through the panel border into the black background (which was, I suspect, for the effect of being on a movie screen). See how it gives the image of the drawing coming out at you. See it? See?

Yeah, me neither.

I can't complain, however. The whole "no glasses" thing gives it a leg up on the competition.

You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover (Part 2)

2005-07-28T22:19:00.000-05:00

It's cooled off in Chicago, so I've been able to get to the various comics I want to talk about in my cover "lesson" (leaving my thoughts on the demise of romance comics for another day).

The photo cover was utilized by publishers mostly the first few years of romance comics' life, and I suspect they were used to more resemble women's magazines like Vogue or Bazaar and confession magazines (which the comic stories were based on) like True Story or True Confessions.

I also think that the publishers thought these covers looked better -- isn't a photo more impressive than a line drawing? -- and many companies, Dell in particular, put photo covers on their comics, especially those titles related to movie or television.

To me, however, photo covers are not particularly exciting. As I mentioned earlier, they were mostly stock photos that the company had likely used in another publishing capacity or had purchased for the sake of putting it on the cover, with no regard for what was going to be inside.

Young Romance #18 featured a lovely brunette (who surely could've done with a little cosmetic dentistry) smiling away, while the blurb below says "Look into the heart of a woman who knows she is losing her man! Read 'Just No Good'". Jeez, if she's losing her man, she certainly isn't letting on any. The story "Just No Good" is about a clarinetist in a jazz band who isn't a good enough fellow to marry the stunning, red-headed singer. No brunette. (The story, drawn by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, isn't one of their best. The last one in the issue, "Mother Tags Along," is great; I always loved the mama's boy tales.)

So, yes, the cover's neat and appealing, and, yes, the girl is certainly attractive and wholesome, but overall I'm not sure if this would make me want to buy this over another comic.

These are the most common type of photo covers. The best, though, are those that feature a little story to them.

For example, Romantic Affairs #3. In it, there's a story ("My Lips Were Too Willing") that featured a doctor (Lee Barrett if you're following at home) who must choose between sisters Claire and Betty Satterlee. The great thing about the cover is that it shows us something, tells us something about what's going to be inside. You pick up that comic and you think, "Oh, that poor girl! Who is it that's coming in? The doctor's fiancee? A nurse that he was dating? And what of the look on the doctor's face! He looks pissed!"

There's someting going on! There's a story there! And, if I had to choose between the two, I think I'd go for Romantic Affairs. (There was a good chance they were both on the stands at the same time, by the way. Young Romance was cover dated February 1950, while Romantic Affairs was March of that same year.)

Of course, it seems that I would've been the only one. Young Romance was by that time one the best selling comics on the stands and would continue to be published for another 25-odd years. This was the only issue of Romantic Affairs.

See what I know, eh?

Goodbye, Sweet Romance

2005-07-26T11:19:00.000-05:00

Last evening was again a scorcher in Chicago, so instead of fishing out some good painted covers, I'm going to start what will be an off-and-on "feature" where I suggest reasons why romance comics died, why they did it when they did, and why they never have come back.

The last romance comic DC published was Young Love #126, cover dated July 1977 (so it was likely on the stands in May). Young Romance, the first ongoing romance comic title and the longest-lasting, had been cancelled a year-and-a-half earlier, and Charlton's last 7 titles all ended with either the November or December 1976 cover date (a few titles re-appeared in late '79 into '80, but they featured no new material and were very sparsely -- even for Charlton -- distributed).

By the mid-to-late 70s, the comic book industry had changed. Much of the variety was gone, and titles and genres that had either dominated the scene in decades past were quickly being cancelled, all replaced with either super-hero titles or more of the same from niche publishers (Archie, for example, was publishing just that -- Archie and his gang -- and even a short-lived entrance into super-heroes was a "safe" bet).

Why was this?

The obvious answer that many people would give you is "sales"; romance comics, never a great seller since their early-50s heyday, were selling less than nearly all of the other titles at Marvel and DC (and elsewhere). But while I think that certainly was a part of it (and it's something I'll talk about in a later post), I really think the main reason why romance comics (and war and Western and humor) were leaving the scene was this: the people who were writing, drawing, and editing comic books weren't fans of genres other than super-heroes, sci-fi, or horror.

The early-70s saw, for the first time in a decade, an influx of new creators. Artist/writers like Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson, Barry Smith, and others came in and changed turned the industry on its head. But, unlike many of the creators of the past whose influences and role-models were often comic strip and fine artists, these young guns looked not to Milton Caniff or Noel Sickles, but to Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, Gil Kane, and other artists of the Silver Age.

These guys were fans and, unless I've completely missed something from one of their bios, none of them were fans of romance comics.

When Roy Thomas took over the editorial chores from Stan Lee in 1972, he was likely the first fan to head a major comic book company. At the time, Marvel was publishing 2 romance titles, My Love and Our Love. By '72, they featured one new story and 3 or 4 reprints from comics of the 50s and 60s (the earliest issues were mostly new content). By end of the titles' runs (they lasted 39 and 38 issues, respectively), the only thing new was the cover.

(This wasn't unsimilar to other genre titles; after leaving a restrictive distribution deal that limited the number of titles they published, Marvel began numerous titles in the late-60s featuring horror, sci-fi, and humor, things they had for the most part abandoned a decade before. As with the romance titles, the first few issues had new stories in most of the comic, but by the end, it was all reprints -- and not great reprints at that. Many stories were heavily edited, sometimes with 2 pages being lopped off.)

My question is this: would the new guys coming into the industry want to write and draw romance comics? The newer stories in Marvel's 70s romance titles were done by long-time industry veterans like John Romita and John Buscema, artists who had done romance comics in the past and were more likely to do another because comics were a job for them -- as opposed to a passion. Would Jim Starlin, having a choice between Captain Marvel and My Love, take a romance title? Not likely. And it seems like new artists weren't even being forced into those situations; they were going to the more established artists.

At Marvel, and increasingly at DC, where the suit-and-tie atmosphere was slowly losing its grip, the inmates were running the asylum, and those who were committed to the nuthouse of comics certainly didn't want to draw anything about that mushy stuff like love or heartache (unless it involved spandex and a bolts shooting out of your hands).

(I feature the cover to Romantic Hearts #12 not for anything to do with today's post, but more because a) I like it, and b) the "Too Old For My Man" blurb made me think of how I old I am. Birthday's are a bitch.)

Old King Cole

2005-07-25T09:01:00.000-05:00

This past week has been very hot in Chicago and, unfortunately, a lot of the comics that I wanted to scan and post that had to do with my cover "themes" were in places that would require a lot of lifting and sorting and sweating (things I'm not very fond of, frankly), so I'm going to hold off until Wednesday when the weather man promised it would cool down.

But in the meantime, I wanted to talk a little about one of the most popular romance comic book artist who, frankly, baffles me.

L.B. Cole was in the comic book business for a long time. By his own accounts (and repeated in numerous places on the Internet), he drew more than 1,500 covers, many which have become very popular and collectible. (Others, like Criminals on the Run #7, are just plain odd.) To me, though, they are pretty stiff.

I think, however, at least with his romance work, a lot of his covers would look a lot better today, with better printing processes. If you look at the cover to Confessions of Romance #7 (seen above), it seems that Cole's use of very florid and feathery lines doesn't come through as it probably did on the inked page, especially when you consider that Star Comics (Confessions' publisher owned by Cole) wasn't large by any means and likely didn't either have the best printers or engravers (the printing's even worse on the inside). To make matters worse, the coloring is always particularly garish (I've yet to meet anyone whose skin was the orange/pink that the woman on the cover has).

Popular Teen-Agers Secrets of Love #17 (man, what a mouthful) is another Cole cover from Star, and it has some of the same problems as Confessions. Odd composition, bright, contrasting colors, sup-par printing. There's something complelling about it (as in most of his work), although I'm not sure I can move my opinion of him from compelling to love (or even like).

It's this odd combination of realism and abstraction. I think it would sell a comic, however; much moreso than what was on the inside.

I met Cole once at a convention in New York City in the late 80s. Golden Age comics (and romance comics especially) were the furthest things from my mind then, but Cole was a guest, and he and his wife had a table full of art and lithographs of some of his more recent paintings. I shook his hand and smiled, but I wish I had spoken with him more.

You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover (Part 1)

2005-07-18T16:45:00.000-05:00

In case you didn't realize it by now, I love romance comics. A lot.

But as much as I love them, they sometimes can be hard to read. They're often times too wordy, the stories (featuring one of 4 possible tales, featuring two of 6 possible characters) are predictable, and the art is often not of the highest quality (for every Alex Toth or Bernard Sachs or Jay Scott Pike there are countless unknown [unfortunately] and not very talented artists).

But what you could usually rely on is that the romance comic had a terrific cover.

Most of the early romance comics featured a photo cover, and they were usually stock photos that were either part of the publishing company's other publications (like with Fawcett or Atlas) or from movie promotional pictures (Prize), but they were for the most part rather boring and had little (or nothing) to do with the stories inside the comic.

There were others (such as the painted cover, which I'll talk about later, and the standard splash, which I'll also discuss), but my favorite of all is what I call the "panel" cover. For the most part, these covers were only on titles put out by Atlas, and they featured a panel culled from each of the stories inside, each placed on the cover with a description or title for each. The largest, usually from the first story of the comic, would be the largest, and it would often have a word balloon or a larger caption along with the story's title. (Sometimes, like in this issue of Justice, all the panels come from the same story.)

There was nothing particularly exciting about these covers, and most of the times it wasn't an artist who put the covers together but an in-house production person, but to me, they scream "value", as if you know there's going to be 4 great stories inside, 4 great tales about love and heartbreak, and even a guy who sometimes gets rough with his girl and only to get socked by the guy with a golden heart.

Certainly there isn't much to them, and they didn't last very long, Stan Lee and Atlas eventually going to the more common splash cover, but while they lasted and even today, they certainly jump out at you.

(Cover courtesy Atlas Tales, a terrific and informative site that any comic book fan should enjoy.)

Modern Romance

2005-07-13T10:18:00.000-05:00

The last continually published romance comics faded away in the mid-70s (although Charlton released a few in the early 80s that were merely reprints -- and not very good ones at that), and the industry has never really returned to the genre.

Well, not exactly.

The autobiographical comic first became popular in the late 60s when underground cartoonists started publishing their own work or publishing it through small, up-and-coming houses (like Kitchen Sink, Last Gasp, and others). Artists like Spain, Robert Crumb, Art Spieglman, and later Dori Seda (and many more) wrote stories of love and disappointment, not too far removed from the love comics of the 50s.

Of course, you'd never see a man humping a woman's leg in True War Romance like you would in one of R. Crumb's strips, but you get the idea.

But since then, and as the underground creeped above the surface and molded into indie (or indy, I never know which is correct) comics like Joe Matt's Peepshow and Jamie Hernandez's Locas stories, there is more romance in comics than there has been in the past 30 years.

The stories, both underground and today, are much more layered than your typical Golden or Silver Age story and they're certainly more adult, but the same thing that has attracted me to the love comics of old has made me want to read these comics of today. I want to see if and how and why people fall in love with someone else and whether or not it will have a happy ending.

Hide Your Children

2005-07-11T11:37:00.000-05:00

As most anyone who collects older comics knows, in the late 40s/early 50s, there was quite the backlash against comics by parents groups, local governments, psychiatrists, and the like. It led to, among other things, the Comics Code, a scathing (and factually unreliable) book in Seduction of the Innocent, and a dip in sales.

For the most part, the attacks were against publishers of crime and horror comics (while EC is often seen as the poster boy for the anti-comics campaign, other publishers such as Ace, St. John's, and Harvey were publishing violent, horrific, and graphic stories), there was also the inevitable slam against the very popular romance comic genre.

From a Washington Post editorial dated January 24, 1950, entitled "Love Stuff":

How far the national preoccupation with romance will go is a question that has been raised by the invasion of comic books by what is called "love stuff." Recently the "boy meets girl" theme was found to be taking over many Western story magazines. Now in about one third of comic books, it is estimated, cartoon courtship has replaced slapstick comedy. Although directed at a teen-age audience, these love comics are said to be finding many followers among adults, the assumption being, as always, that frustrated housewives find them a means of vicarious romance.
Total readership of comics book is put at around 70 million. This means that at least 20 million readers are turning to comics for heart thrills. Since "love stuff" also dominates soap operas, movies, slick magazine fiction and popular songs, most of the population must be constantly engrossed in at least the chaff of love. Yet the decadence and violence of the times do not reflect such preoccupation. Or perhaps the times are promoting this escape into a world where human beings look even intermittently on each other with favor.

Is this unnamed editorial writer that dense? He/she mocks the idea that "most of the population must be constantly engrosed in at least the chaff of love." Well, no shit! Even in the conservative environment of the post-War era, boys were still falling for that swell gal down the block, girls were still swooning over that handsome fellow, and there was plenty of hanky-panky going on. It was the baby-boom after all.

I suppose, when it comes to "love stuff" seeping into Western stories, the writer still wished that the only thing that was kissed by the end of the tale was the horse.

Sudsy

2005-07-06T20:09:00.000-05:00

I've never seen the appeal of soap operas. Even in college, when everyone would rather sit down for hours and watch All My Children and The Young and the Restless instead of studying or going to class, I would rather... well, it certainly wasn't studying or going to class.

It's undeniable, however, that they're popular. Millions of people watch them daily, mainly women, and they often will follow the same show, the same characters, for years.

In the 60s, Marvel revolutionized super-hero comics, and many of their stories became soap-opera-like. Romance, heartache, double-crosses. And, as it became very obvious, people loved them.

DC, by now not really the innovator that it was and would be again, tried their hand at the soap opera gimmick with a couple of their romance titles. In Heart Throbs, there were the "3 Girls", a storyline over 25 parts that followed the love lives of 3 Manhattan ladies sharing an apartment (and men). And in Secret Hearts, it was "Reach for Happiness," of which the above cover (issue 110) has the first installment.

The first two stories in the issue (If You Ever Leave Me Again and My One and Only Love) were touched up older stories (to modernize the hair and clothing styles), but the third, coming in at 15 pages, is the doozy.

Reach for Happiness, according to the opening panel, was "The day-by-day story of real people trapped in a whirlpool of life and death, love and hate, laughter and tears, as they reach for happiness", and it featured a group of California young men and women, many of whom either doctors or nurses (a romance comics staple) or actresses and models (another staple). The art was by Gene Colan (who did several romance stories after returning to comics, just before heading over to Marvel to draw Daredevil and Sub-Mariner), and it showed a lot of emotion. But for the most part, the characters, unlike their television counterparts, had little depth, and the story was predictible.

Although bother the Heart Throbs and Secret Hearts serials lasted for over two years, they didn't revolutionize romance comics, and only slowed down their eventual disappearance.

But it was a good try.

Yee-Haw!

2005-07-01T10:31:00.000-05:00

One of the best things about Golden and Atom (ugh) Age comics is that publishers tried everything. The thought up 100 different things, mixed and matched, threw them against the wall, and sometimes things stuck (Strange Adventures) and sometimes they fell to ground never to be heard from again (Camera Comics).

When romance comics started to sell, publishers quickly combined them with another popular genre -- Westerns.

(I have never really seen the appeal of the Western, whether in comics or other media. Other than a few Sergio Leone films, I've haven't been really interested in the stuff, and even Western "literature" like Cormac MacCarthy bores me to tears. And don't even get me started on Lonesome Dove and its ilk.)

Westerns had been popular in comics since the late-30s (Western Stars), and in the 40s, with Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Tom Mix and others gracing the movie (and then television) screen, it became even more popular, as many publishers, most notably Fawcett and Dell (Western) put out dozens of titles. Heck, Charlton even published the fantastically insane Space Western Comics.

So you'd expect that romance and Westerns would eventually meet, and they did, with such titles as Western Love, Cowboy (and Cowgirl) Romances, and Romances of the West. Most of them featured stories of either good cowboys conquering the villanous rancher and winning the love of the gingham-wearing girl or the occasional tom-girl who ropes her way into romance.

Few of the titles ever lasted more than a handfull of issues, and non for longer than 15 issues.

If only someone would've thought of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman 40 years earlier.

Fake Nostalgia Is the Best

2005-06-29T10:09:00.000-05:00

I love romance comics, but I don't think of myself as a particularly romantic guy. Sure, I can be sappy at times and there's nothing better than two people really falling in love, but romance comics aren't really about love and romance as much as they're about heartache and pain.

And rarely in romance comics is the heartache and pain justified -- it usually ends up being some silly "Three's Company"-esque mixup, where the boyfriend really wasn't cheating on you, he was only hugging his second cousin.

Anyway, I was thinking why I liked romance comics, if not for my own notions of love and passion and whatnot. I think it comes down to this -- I love the era of when romance comics were popular (the 50s), and I love the way that the writers and artists got it all wrong.

I wasn't around in the 50s (heck, I wasn't born until the early 70s), but from reading and research, you realize that the 50s was not this idyllic time of 3-month vacations at a cabin in the country or steady boyfriends who were always gentlemen. It wasn't so much different than now -- just without the iPods.

It reminds me of a story my mother tells about her dating life. She once dated a boy who was the prototypical gentleman when he came to pick her up from her parents' house. He sat and spoke with my grandparents, was kind, cordial, intelligent. They loved him, and weren't bashful about telling my mother that he'd make a wonderful husband.

Of course, once the door to the house closed behind them and my mother got into his car, he couldn't keep his hands off her.

"He pawed me nonstop from when we left the house to when he dropped me off," my mother said.

Certainly not the gentleman my grandparents wanted in their family.

I think this isn't much different than today -- pawing still is the favorite pasttime of boys throughout the nation -- but you really didn't see much of that in comics. Most of the times when the boys kissed the girls (even though she protested), such protests quickly melted away into love.

Somehow I can't see a story in Love Confessions being, "My Boyfriend Was All Hands".

The 10-year Fad

2005-06-21T14:32:00.000-05:00

Trends seem to come and go faster than ever. Perhaps it's the new, Internet era that we all live in, where information and ideas can quickly spread across the country (and world). Perhaps it's the new short-attention span we've all been infected with.

If you think of things like style (which my wife thinks about a lot, she being the fashion maven of the Cheli house), it's even more drastic than before. In the late-70s/early-80s, a new fashion sense came out of New York City, with adidas sneakers (with the fat laces, of course) and track suits, thick gold chains, and more (you can see what I'm talking about in the book Back in the Days, a terrific photographic history of the fashion of that era by Jamel Shabazz). While that was the style of the city of the time, it didn't hit Chicago or Miami or L.A. until later as it slowly worked its way throughout the US, taking even longer for it to reach the heartland.

Eventually it did, and it took over. Kids -- white, black, Hispanic -- all started to wear those shoes, those pants, those skirts. It certainly blew the preppies to bits. But it took years to happen. And, by the time it reached Des Moines, New Yorkers were on to something else.

Now, however, a style can pop up in New York or Palm Beach or wherever, and (especially if it's being shown off by the latest "it" guy or gal) within a week it's splashed throughout the Internet, in the pages of US Weekly, or on Entertainment Tonight. And, because the saturation is so quick, it's just as quickly gone from our collective consciousness.

Look at those stupid Von Dutch hats and t-shirts. For 3 1/2 minutes, they were all the rage. Why, if Ashton Kutchor wanted to wear his trucker hat cocked to one side, then you should too. Off course, 3 1/2 minutes later, they were 80% off at Marshall's.

It's no different when it comes to comics.

Today, comic book news is right there in your face. You know what's coming up (at the earliest) 3 months in advance, and in many cases a year. You see what the popular creators are going to be working on, what new mini-series or company-wide crossover is going to sap your money, and there is little or no "new" when you walk into a comic shop or bookstore. You already know what to expect.

And because of that, there is very little room for something different. Fans (and retailers) already decry something a hit or failure (more likely in this pessimistic industry) before you even have a chance to read it. So we often end up getting the same things from the big publishers.

Super heroes.

A little horror now and again.

More super heroes.

And the failed sci-fi series that runs 6 issues.

And, of course, more super heroes.

Things were different in the comics industry in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and even 60s. Sure, there were still a ton of copycats (every company had their costumed crime fighters), but instead of looking for more of the same, they were looking for the NEXT BIG THING. And because lead-in times for comics were much longer then (the content of a comic had to be completed months before its publication date, compared with weeks or even days now), publishers weren't able to be so quick to jump on the bandwagon.

Look at the return of Marvel Comics to publishing super hero titles, for example. National (DC) had been very sucessful with their return of costume crime-fighters like the Flash, Green Lantern, and others, and it was years before Stan Lee and Jack Kirby matched it with the Fantastic Four.

Years.

Today, when there's a hit, within a week a competitor can get something together and, within a couple of months, get it into the shops.

Of course, this quick-to-copy mentality can make for a) boring comics and b) the quick extinction of those types of comics. (Look at the recent 80s revival for a second. G.I. Joe? Transformers? He-Man? They've all died or are in the process of dying [and being resurrected].)

But when Joe Simon and Jack Kirby launched Young Romance in mid-1947, it was a year before something else was on the shelves. And it wasn't until 1949 when there were more than a handful of the titles out there.

And they were selling like mad. Romance comics were regularly out-selling many of the quickly dying super hero comics. By 1952, there were as many as 40 romance comics out on the newsstand any one month.

Of course, by 1957, nearly all were gone, reduced only to the best selling or the throwaways.

But that's 10 years. Ten years where a genre, a style, either dominated or was an integral part of an industry.

When was the last time a style lasted that long, and do you honestly think it will ever happen again?

It might if it's given a chance to grow and progress and develop.

Sauce For the Gander

2005-06-17T19:15:00.000-05:00

Not only do I collect romance comics, but I also dabble in romance comic original art (if I can find it cheaply enough, which is getting harder and harder to do).

The great thing about the original art is that, like most comics published pre-1960, it's oversized (15"X20"), so that when you hold it in your hands and look at it, it really jumps off the page. One of the pages I have is a one-page story from a Standard Comic (I have a few from them -- a lot of those originals have survived the years), the story being called "Sauce for the Gander", from Thrilling Romances (with art by Art Saaf, an Alex Toth protege).

It's your typical moralistic tale -- the heroine is always late for her dates with her young beau, and this evening is no different. He's nearly fed up, and when she invites him to meet her aunt coming in from out of town the next night he agrees. When he shows up late, she's furious, but the joke's on her. It was planned all along, just to show what it feels like to have to wait for the one you love.

Of course, I have no idea what "Sauce for the Gander" means, but that makes it all the better, no?