Romance comics

History

As World War II ended the popularity of superhero comics diminished, and in an effort to retain readers comic publishers began diversifying more than ever into such genres as war, Western, science fiction, crime, horror and romance comics. The genre took its immediate inspiration from the romance pulps; confession magazines such as True Story; radio soap operas, and newspaper comic strips that focused on love, domestic strife, and heartache, such as Rex Morgan, M.D. and Mary Worth. Teen humor comics had romantic plots before the invention of romance comics.

Simon and Kirby's Young Romance debuted in 1947. In the next 30 years, over 200 issues of the flagship romance comic would be produced.

By 1950, more than 150 romance titles were on the newsstands from publishers such as Quality Comics, Avon, Lev Gleason Publications, and National (DC Comics). More than one in four of the comic books released in the first half of that year were romance comics and a graph in Newsdealer magazine for that year showed that women aged 17-25 were reading more comic books than the males. The number of titles was too many for the market to bear; there was a collapse in the last half of1950, followed by a more sustainable revival in the years 1951-56.

Love comic books typically featured several self-contained stories per issue, narrated in the first person by the female protagonist of the story in a confessional style.

The DC Comics romance line was initially overseen by Jack Miller, who also wrote many stories. (Later, a number of female editors oversaw DC's romance line, including Zena Brody and Dorothy Woolfolk.) As author Michelle Nolan writes, "National's romance line was remarkably stable and thus must have sold consistently well. Beginning in 1952, ... the company produced Girls' Love Stories, Girls' Romances, and Secret Hearts on a bi-monthly basis through late 1957, when those three titles along with Falling in Love began to appear eight times per year.... The company picked up a fifth romance title, Heart Throbs, ... after Quality Comics left the business in 1956." By 1970, right before the romance market collapsed, DC had seven romance titles.

Fox Feature Syndicate published over two dozen love comics with 17 featuring "My" in the title—My Desire, My Secret, My Secret Affair, et al.

Charlton Comics published a wide line of romance titles, particularly after 1953 when it acquired the Fawcett Comics line, which included Sweethearts, Romantic Secrets, and Romantic Story. Sweethearts was the comics world's first monthly romance title (debuting in 1948), and Charlton continued publishing it until 1973.

Artists known for their work on romance comics during the period included Tony Abruzzo, Matt Baker, Frank Frazetta, Everett Kinstler, Jay Scott Pike, John Prentice, John Romita, Sr., Mike Sekowsky, Leonard Starr, Alex Toth, and Wally Wood. Romance comics were relatively welcoming to women artists; notable female artists of the 1950s included Alice Kirkpatrick, Valerie Barclay, Ruth Atkinson and Ann Brewster.

Decline and Golden Age demise

In his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), Fredric Wertham argued that romance comics sexualized female characters, stating that many of them used sensual images, such as accentuated breasts and hips, to attract the attention of readers, especially teenage boys, which he saw as a form of premature and inappropriate sexual stimulation.

He also mocked warnings such as “Not Intended For Children,” which, according to him, only increased youthful interest, and satirized figures such as the “super-lover,” the romantic version of superheroes. For Wertham, these magazines were even more boring than detective comics, filled with sentimentality, false feelings, and hypocrisy.

Following the implementation of the Comics Code in 1954, publishers of romance comics self-censored the content of their publications, making the stories bland and innocent with an emphasis on traditional patriarchial concepts of women's behavior, gender roles, domesticity, and marriage. Visually, women became less sexualized and their clothing more modest.

When the sexual revolution questioned the values promoted in romance comics, along with the decline in comics in general, romance comics began their slow fade. DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Charlton Comics carried a few romance titles into the middle 1970s, but the genre never regained the level of popularity it once enjoyed. The era of romance comics came to an end with the last issues of Young Romance and Young Love in the middle 1970s.

Charlton and DC artist and editor Dick Giordano stated in 2005: "[G]irls simply outgrew romance comics ... [The content was] too tame for the more sophisticated, sexually liberated, women's libbers [who] were able to see nudity, strong sexual content, and life the way it really was in other media. Hand-holding and pining after the cute boy on the football team just didn't do it anymore, and the Comics Code wouldn't pass anything that truly resembled real-life relationships." Comic book artist and historian Trina Robbins points out that the stories were by then edited and written by people who were out of touch with the interests of girls and young women: "the stories, no matter how well-drawn, read as though they were written by clueless forty-five year old men - which they were."

Decades later, romance-themed comics made a modest resurgence with Arrow Publications' "My Romance Stories", Renegade Comics Renegade Romance, Dark Horse Comics' manga-style adaptations of Harlequin novels, and long-running serials such as Strangers in Paradise — described by one reviewer as an attempt "to single-handedly update an entire genre with a new, skewed look at relationships and friendships."

In popular culture

Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein derived many of his best-known works from the panels of romance comics:

• Crying Girl (1963) — adapted from "Escape from Loneliness," pencilled by Tony Abruzzo and inked by Bernard Sachs, in Secret Hearts #88 (DC Comics, June 1963)
• Crying Girl (1964) — adapted from "Exit Love--Enter Heartbreak!", drawn by Werner Roth and John Romita Sr. in Secret Hearts #88 (DC Comics, June 1963)
• Drowning Girl (1963) — Lichtenstein adapted the splash page from "Run for Love!", illustrated by Tony Abruzzo and lettered by Ira Schnapp, in Secret Hearts #83 (DC Comics, November 1962)
• Hopeless (1963) — adapted from a panel from the same story, "Run for Love!", artwork by Tony Abruzzo and lettered by Ira Schnapp, in Secret Hearts #83 (November 1962)
• In the Car (sometimes called Driving) (1963) — adapted from a Tony Abruzzo panel in Girls' Romances #78 (DC, September 1961)
• Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But... (1964) — adapted from a panel by Tony Abruzzo
• Ohhh...Alright... (1964) — also derived from Secret Hearts #88 (June 1963)
• Sleeping Girl (1964) — based on a Tony Abruzzo panel from Girls' Romances #105 (October 1964).
• We Rose Up Slowly (1964) — based on a panel from Girls' Romances #81 (January 1962)

Notable romance comics

Reprints

Comics historian John Benson collected and analyzed St. John Publications' romance comics in Romance Without Tears (Fantagraphics, 2003), focusing on the elusive comics scripter Dana Dutch, and the companion volume Confessions, Romances, Secrets and Temptations: Archer St. John and the St. John Romance Comics (Fantagraphics, 2007). To research the 1950s era of romance comics, Benson interviewed Ric Estrada, Joe Kubert and Leonard Starr, plus several St. John staffers, including editor Irwin Stein, production artist Warren Kremer and editorial assistant Nadine King.

In 2011, an anthology Agonizing Love: The Golden Era of Romance Comics, edited by Michael Barson, was published by Harper Design. In 2012, many of Simon and Kirby's romance comics were reprinted by Fantagraphics in a collection entitled Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby's 1940s-'50s Romance Comics, edited by Michel Gagné.

British romance comics

Romance comics in the United Kingdom also flourished in the mid-1950s with such weekly titles as Mirabelle (Pearson), Picture Romances (Newnes/IPC), Valentine (Amalgamated Press), and Romeo (DC Thomson). All four titles lasted into the 1970s. Other British romance comics included Marilyn (1955–1965), New Glamour (1956–1958), Roxy (1958–1963), Marty (1960–1963), and Serenade (1962–1963); all of which eventually merged into Valentine and Mirabelle (Valentine itself merged into Mirabelle in 1974).

In 1956–1957 DC Thomson launched a line of monthly romance titles: Blue Rosette Romances, Golden Heart Love Stories, Love & Life Library, and Silver Moon Romances. In April 1965, all four titles were merged into the single weekly Star Love Stories title, with one issue per month maintaining the cover logo from the original companion titles.

• Golden Heart Love Stories featured on Star Love Stories #98, 102, 106, and so on
• Love & Life Library featured on Star Love Stories #99, 103, 107, and so on
• Blue Rosette Romances featured on Star Love Stories #100, 104, 108, and so on
• Silver Moon Romances featured on Star Love Stories #101, 105, 109, and so on

The rotation of the four legacy logos on the covers of Star Love Stories continued each month until they were finally dropped in 1970.-- Star Love Stories, which changed its name to Star Love Stories in Pictures in 1976, lasted until 1990.

The photo comic romance titles Photo Love and Photo Secret debuted in 1979 and 1980 respectively. They both eventually merged into another publication.

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

References

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