THREE ESSAYS ON WHY I COLLECT ROMANCE COMICS+COMIC HISTORY WRITTEN BY LOSERS

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Magnum Opus not forth-coming, yet.

 

As of these that follow, I can't believe I'm still proofreading and finding errors!

 

 

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What do pinups, girl reporters, wimmin’s libbers and riot grrrlz have in common? A nice lot of different Silver or Bronze Age, (1960's &1970's) DC & Charlton romance comic books.

The DC romance comics of the late sixties and early seventies had absolutely gorgeous art and the stories were sophisticated and very mod in their reflection of the new morality of the times: inter-racial love and unwed mothers, as well as thinly-guised allusions to prostitution and lesbianism. However, the Charlton romance comics of the same era were probably the absolute worst comics ever produced. Each issue gave the impression that, after having blown the entire monthly budget on a beautiful cover, the editors parceled out the interior pages for peanuts to very talented high school student relatives of the staff. On top of the bad art, Charlton used mechanical lettering, which contributed chilliness to their pages. Sudsy soaps with torrid titles like “Love Thy Neighbor” and “The Hippy and the Cop” promised more than they delivered. With dismal stories and hideous art, Charltons truly are undiscovered gems if you like oddball, weirdo comics.

In romance comics prior to 1965 the most a woman could aspire to was the position of nurse, private secretary or model. And they always gave it up anyway to get married and become housewives. The entire country had changed drastically by the mid-sixties and romance comics tried to keep up with the change and failed miserably. Although our heroines moved up in the world; they evolved from working-class waitresses and housewives into college students, airline stewardesses, rock stars and models, the stories remained mostly the same: some fetching, lush-lipped heroine, tear in her eye, agonizing over - something - a lost love, a lost job, parents who just don’t understand, sexist pig boyfriends, back-stabbin’.

Some of these comics got pretty sordid or as sordid as they were allowed to exist in those days. Cheating, underage sex, wild parties, bad crowds: these topics were still somewhat taboo at that time. Often the art featured classic “good girl” art featuring “headlights,” spanking panels, slapping panels, shower scenes, negligee panels, etc. An even seemier story appears in … from the ….issue of …

Interesting "generation gap" comics emerged as the publishers tried to appeal to mid-to-late teenage girls The writers wanted to be "with it" but in many cases just didn't know quite how. Unfortunately, in a desperate attempt to be hip, the stories read as though they were written by clueless 45 year old men. Which they were. The results are unintentionally hilarious. Embarrassingly pseudo-hip dialogue such as…I can’t pick just one. On every page someone says something incredibly strange. It’s all…simply…too…much. You’ll be beside yourself saying, “Did I just read that correctly? I can’t believe I’m reading this. Is this how it really was? They couldn’t have actually done, said or wore those things. It’s all just so…alien. And they thought it was cool.” Haircuts, fashion and slang in these comics captures that tasteless late-1960’s to mid-1970s era of groovy hippies and hot disco music.

These types of comics are the source of the generic “pop art” look seen today on hundreds of campy T-shirts, cups, greeting cards, kitchen magnets and Roy Lichtenstein’s Ban-Day dot oil paintings. A virtual treasure trove of clip art. Real corny period pieces. A sociology student could write a thesis and a fashion student could find inspiration. The rest of us are ROTFL. These books are still unresearched in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide for the most part.

Joe Gill, who wrote most of Charlton’s romance comics, says he always felt a responsibility to keep the stories clean and moral. “I knew what I was writing was being read by young, impressionable people…and I didn’t want to corrupt them. You know, virtue has its own rewards…(laughs) and all that s--t. Television changed all the values of the (subsequent) generation enormously. They found out about sex and drugs. It was pretty sordid. And these harmless little comics had no place in their lives.” The books were looked at with the same derision as Harlequin books and TV soap operas. Gill remembers that, “I worked for Stan Lee way back when and as assignments were getting rarer he offered me some romance assignments - and I wouldn’t do them. I thought they were sissy stuff. I’d rather go work on the docks.” Later, of course, with a family to feed, Gill changed his mind and while at Charlton went on to become probably the most prolific romance comic book writer of all time.

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If Not Superheroes, What? - Romance Comics?One comics form, though it enjoyed a decades-long history, became a casualty to the changing mores of the culture (in addition to the other vectors that lead comics to extinction). The perceived obsolescence of the monogamistic ideal, as viewed through the selective lens of the sexual revolutionary, rendered tales that idealized old-school approaches to pair-bonding themselves obsolescent. Sometime between the fifties, romance literature (including prose and comics) would shift from fantasies about meeting and marrying Prince Charming to fantasies about husbands who conveniently die to clear the field for the newer, younger, and more interesting Prince Charmings (see publishers like Harlequin, et al). In the process, comics fans - which, over time, increasingly comes to mean superhero comics fans - came to view romance comics with a sneer, in spite of a much more solid grounding in reality and an overall greater relevance to readers even vaguely within the gene pool. Examined as literature, however, the romance comic does not necessarily have less to offer, storytelling-wise, than, say, the superhero comic; it just averages a more plausible wardrobe all around, a few less space aliens, and sound effects less likely to rouse the children from their naps. And, as with other specimens of the other comics - the pieces that once existed before superhero comics consumed the market - the romance comic generally played a variation of one of a set of fairly reliable themes.

Origins

A great die-off of superheroes began with the end of World War II. The loss of military contracts to provide disposable reading matter to servicemen overseas ate into sales figures; the aging of a readership in a day when one generally considered teenagers too old for reading comics moved domestic patrons out of the market; and, of course, not all heroes had what it takes to create an enduring readership. If the superhero ailed in those days, comics creators themselves kept moving to attempt to present material that would engage readers and, therefore, move off the news stands. Sometimes existing genres rose into the vacancies created by expiring superhero material; sometimes publishers crowded out failing heroes to make way for other, theoretically more commercial material. In this era, we saw as a defining event the eviction of Green Lantern from his own title to make space for a wonder dog strip. After the end of the war, popular interest somewhat shifted from martial concerns (say, costumed heroes) to domestic ones (say, radio serials and movies dealing with romance). Radio, television, and theater consumed increasing chunks of recreation time in the decade immediately following the end of the War, and two innovative talents from the thirties and forties - Joe Simon and Jack Kirby - decided to test the waters of romance in comic book form in 1947. For its moment, the form would flower, even spawning sub-variants such as cowboy romance material and Black romance comics. And the flagship romance comic, Young Romance, would endure through over 200 issues and over 20 years, spanning more than one publisher in the decades of its existence.

Conventions

False confessions became an early conceit of the romance comics back in the day when the entire genre belonged to its creators, Simon and Kirby. Given the fictional device of first-person narration combined with the relentless maleness of the two creators, one can see as inevitable that a certain amount of fraud (of the kind absolved by willing suspension of belief) would originate with comics with female protagonists. Magazines with titles like True This and Real That led the way for this approach. Moralism also played a central role, as it would in a number of comics forms that predated the Code that arose to address the immorality of the form. Characters met bad ends in proportion to the bad deeds they perpetrated; blackmailers and scoundrels could expect disgrace, jail, or even death so reliably that one would assume moral laws drove the physics of comics. One may also note that, since the romance comics barely endured into the seventies, that the morality they depicted resounded with pre-sexual revolution themes. Hence a norm of hetero-monogamy prevailed. This provided the third key element: The monogamistic happy ending that stood as the Mecca all characters seemed to seek in the romance comics. In an age where Everyman seemed to view marriage as central to long-term happiness - certainly an arguable position - all tales sought, and either achieved or failed to achieve, this goal. With some combination of the three principle conventions of the form, romance comics furthermore explored tales which typically fell into categories such as Cinderella fantasies, near escapes, tragic endings, fantastic redemptions, and just deserts.

Cinderella Fantasies

A harsh commercial of an earlier decade featured a young girl, playing with some dolls, and babbling on about how a prince would someday take her as his wife and solve, once and for all, her material needs. This particular gem of advertising ended with the claim that the young heroine could expect to appear on the welfare rolls with a head full of such fantasies. While one might well invite the authors of such shock-and-naysaying material to lighten up or at least leave the pessimism at home a few days out of the year, the Cinderella Fantasy does still offer a sometimes-destructive lure to females in a variety of cultures. The fantasy tends to do its damage by training young people to expect a Prince Charming - a kind of deus ex machina but with money and big pectorals - to make everything right. While one focuses one's strategies on waiting for unlikely happenings such as the timely appearance of a Prince, one does not invest in a future made better through one's own efforts; and this applies across lines of sex, gender, or whatever folks call it these days. Preparing for the worst does more good than idling away time hoping for the best without human effort to back it up. The romance comic originated in a day where western culture offered many fewer opportunities for self-reliance for females, and quietly expired in a period that suggested new possibilities. Perhaps the perceived "corniness" of Cinderella-fantasy material helped bring the romance comics down; and perhaps such fantasy became less and less relevant. The publishers of the pure-prose bodice-ripper don't seem to think so, however.

Near Escapes

The near escape story enjoyed a flexible range of components, depending on the thing from which our protagonists - typically female - needed to escape. Their own pasts, simple bad luck, or the schemes of wicked rivals for a partner's affections (or of wicked contenders for their own) provided the raw material for the near escape story. Temptation frequently played a central role in stories of this sort. Partially because this helped real people to relate to fictional stories, and partially because too much strength of character can make players dishwater dull, our stalwart heroines risked falling into the gap between what they wanted, what they could have, and what they should have, a differential frequently thrown into contrast by desires for material security or simple devotion from a tenuous partner in love. However, the moral determinism of many comics - the poetic justice that could, if necessary, overturn natural law - ultimately righted wrongs brought about by the evil intent of characters in the romance comics. So, if one looks at contemporaneous material, one can see a common pattern of karmic retribution. The Comics Code Authority did not invent this morality; it just codified it as an editorial standard with the power of preemptive censorship for material that failed to comply.

Tragic Endings

On one level, romance comics dared take a more adult approach than many other forms of comics, including the earlier and later superhero comics. Free from the burdens created by combining a shared universe/continuity model with an ongoing monthly publishing schedule, the romance comic could, if the story required, kill off major players (who, we must admit, probably never appeared before and almost certainly would never appear again anyway). This gave a freedom lacking from comics forms that use editorial models that claim to allow for or even require change yet must not dispose of the intellectual properties that move the books in the first place. A widow or ex-lover could relate the details of the event which forever separated her from her beau. The five-and-ten pager, after all, allowed creators to reach for effect rather than requiring them to build on a canon of stories. If the tone writers and artists sought required the Loving Husband to die saving the world from the Hun so that his bereaved could get maudlin and reflect on an idealized version of a short yet intense marriage, they could slaughter with impunity.

Fantastic Redemptions

Although wickedness tended to bring characters to well-deserved bad ends, plenty of stories allowed once-wayward characters a chance to redeem themselves from a past not always fully of their own creation. Variants of the Reform School Girl Romance and the Poor Girl Transcends Her Humble Origins made for a consistent fodder of the romance comics. In general, though, these stories deal with either reformed characters - meaning protagonists with a seedy past but a fairly upright present or those who, in the present, do little worse than attempt to conceal a long-past seediness lest it wreck their futures. And they also conveyed a moralistic, and frequently unrealistic, message about the concrete and external benefits due to those who reform on an abstract and internal level. With this kind of story, the wish-fulfillment element of the romance comics shows more strongly than in many of the other versions.

Just Deserts

Wicked women and scandalous rakes both appeared, as a kind of ferment, in many tales of the old romance comics. Without the Serpent in Eden, after all, the story amounts to little more than two people picking fruit off trees all day and trying to invent new ways to combat the ever-mounting boredom. Someone has to make trouble or nothing might ever happen. [Misbehaving beaux and belles, as staples of the form.] As well, the Just Deserts model of romance comics story served its wish fulfillment aspect rather well. People whom others have wronged, after all, may wish to see some of the suffering bad people inflict return to them rather than fall exclusively on the shoulders of the innocent and the exploited. Typical romance-comics offenses include mate-stealing; mate-killing, to replace an older model with a newer one; concealment of an ongoing lurid or criminal double life; and a repertoire of methods for ruining the lives of married couples for the sake of attempting to have more than one deserves. The moralism of the form makes itself well-felt here. Ignore the nihilism of twentieth-century classical prose pieces like Kafka's "The Metamorphosis;" the rogue and the vampire (in the old sense of the term, used to label a woman as greedy and parasitic) either found themselves alone, or in jail, or even dead.

The Fate of the Form

A multi-tiered attack ultimately caused the romance comics, after a quarter of a century, to disappear from the news racks. No one of these forces killed off the form - indeed, it could resurface someday - but the combination of factors working against this genre ultimately smothered it under its cumulative weight. A changing morality made their moral emphasis appear quaint and dated (by modern standards, the emphasis on hetero-monogamy might appear positively malign); the reward of home and hearth began to seem irrelevant or even a form of bondage; across all genres, comics had suffered in the mid and late fifties from factors including growing disinterest and a censorship of prior restraint; the post-Stan Lee comics would preempt somewhat the romance theme by allowing superheroes solid romantic connections; and, finally, the superhero comic would come to dominate the aesthetic ecosystem of the form to the point of crowding out other material, regardless of genre.

The Talent

Names that one normally doesn't associate with the romance comic, since they attach to other, previous or subsequent, achievements, belong in the canon of romance comic talent, including its inventors, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Observers of the medium suggest that a number of canonical figures of fifties and sixties comics (or that got their start there) did so in the early romance comics, acquiring a different set of skills than required by the superhero stories that once propelled the medium. Names like Matt Baker, Frank Frazetta, Everett R. Kinstler, Jay Scott Pike, John Romita Senior, Leonard Starr, Alex Toth, and Wally Wood belong in this set (according to Jim Korkis in Teen Angst). Some would go on to distinguish themselves in other genres, including, but not limited to, the ubiquitous superhero form. We can add other names to this. Marie Severin, for instance, described one Marvel job she received doctoring old romance comic pages from the sixties to make the clothes more appropriate for 1970, installing details like flared trouser cuffs and pointy collars (a task of considerable tedium). A particular set of talents developed in the romance form, including skills not always acquirable in today's superhero-dominated comics market. In a romance comic, the credibility of characters and settings assumes an importance generally foreign to more fantastic genres: Anatomy that never occurs in nature, clothing that would violate the dress code of a circus, and facial expressions that fall into two categories (snarl and non-snarl) would all ruin the plausibility of a romance comic. So artists learned to bring out the nuances of emoting faces, the detail of conventional clothing, and human bodies that suggested the beautiful but not the impossible. Using Romita as an example - if an exceptional one - we can note that his assumption of the artistic role on Amazing Spider-Man saw an increasingly expressive set of characters and a definitely more beautiful female (and, for that matter, male) cast. Romita may not have worked in the wildly imaginative manner typical of Ditko on pieces like Dr. Strange stories, but he certainly brought a great deal to the books he worked on, regardless of the subject matter, and the best things he brought seemed relevant to his romance comics background. Owing to the small footprint that romance comics seems to have left on fandom - the superhero form dominates fandom in a way that leaves some of the once-diverse comics medium to the attention of scholarly historians of the subject - locating a canonical list of the artists and writers who made their careers on this material represents a problem of the very availability of the information.

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Why British Girls' Comics Were Wonderful

Ponies and ballet and school! If you think that's what girls comics were all about, then you never read any. Or at least, you never read any good ones.

Yes, there were ponies, usually ones that our heroine had to ride in secret/save from an evil relative who wanted to send it to the knacker's yard/tame in order to win a competition, to the astonishment of all, especially the evil snob who had money for riding lessons and thought her victory was in the bag.

The Lonely Ballerina

Yes, there was ballet, and girls who loved it but were forbidden to dance by aunts who were jealous of their talent, or who had lost ballerina sisters and were scared that their nieces would come to ballet-related deaths too.

And of course there were schools, from the Angela Brazil-ish boarding school St Elmo's of Bunty's The Four Marys, to the Grange Hill-like comp attended by Pam of Pond Hill in Jinty. Girls' comic schools of the Eighties and Nineties sometimes even had (gasp) boys in attendance!

But there was so much more...

Sister of the Bride

In the early days of what we'll elitistly call 'proper' girls' comics - those which included comic strips alongside their text stories and illustrated strip stories - there were a lot of aspirational figures for girls: teens or older who had nice jobs or nice fiancés.

Girls were supposed to be air stewardesses or nurses, or if they were particularly special, ballet dancers or models - but were, of course, expected to give up their career when they married. Bunty's 'Sister of the Bride' had terrible trouble in the late Sixties, valiantly sabotaging her sister's career to ensure a happy marriage ensued.

Back in the first issue of Bunty, from 1958, we were introduced via text story to Lyn Raymond, Air Stewardess - 'She has the tip-toppest job of all for girls'. Lyn, who was late for her interview through helping a blind man, but got the job because he was a plant, gave us an important moral message, echoed throughout the years of girls' comics. If you selflessly stop to help blind men/lost children/ill beggars, then your kindness will be returned tenfold, and you will achieve what you thought you'd lost, while your selfish rival will lose all.

Other moral messages were delivered by comics throughout the years. IPC's supernatural comic of the Seventies, Misty, gave us new moral lessons every week, often in superb punishment-fitting-the-crime style. Don't be vain, or ugly monsters will tear you apart. Don't cause trouble at your mum's shop, or you will be turned into a shop dummy. Don't collect butterflies, or aliens will hunt and kill you for their collections. Don't eat prawns, or prawn-like aliens will eat you, having first dipped you in garlic sauce. The beauty - or horror - of Misty was that you didn't even have to be an evil person for a terrible fate to take you - you only had to have one tiny little moral hiccup, if that, to be damned for all eternity.

Misty was a comic particularly popular with boys, who would, of course, never admit to it for fear of playground beatings. But, you see, Misty was more than just another girls' comic...

Girls generally like different things to boys, story-wise. They like emotion, hardship, tragedy. Action and violence are not really their cups of tea. And although nearly every person working on a girls' comic was male, they played to these strengths, producing heartrending and heartwarming stories of Victorian orphans and downtrodden gymnasts.

In the mid Seventies, DC Thomson came up with a brilliant idea: a new supernatural comic for girls, Spellbound. But it was still - well, a bit girly. While over at IPC, Pat Mills and John Wagner were among those let loose on girls' comics. The heroines were still girls. They still told the sorts of stories girls liked. But 'girly' they weren't...

Misty dealt with horror, offering tales of ghosts and deals with the devil. Jinty now interspersed its schools and gymnasts with superb science-fiction stories. Oh, Jinty's science-fiction stories! They are the pinnacle of girls' comics, and I'll pull the hair of anyone who says otherwise.

Worlds Apart

There was Land of No Tears - 'Hop-Along' Cassy, who would have horrified the Daily Mail with her desire to stay 'crippled' for the sympathy it gets her, finds herself in a future where perfection is all. There was The Human Zoo, where identical twins are captured by aliens who treat humans like animals. And most glorious of all, there was Worlds Apart, where six girls find themselves trapped in a series of worlds which are distorted versions of their own desires, and can only escape through the death of the girl whose mind they're in… Any story which starts 'The day began like any other. A road tanker carrying highly dangerous chemical waste left a government research establishment' has got to be good, but as we journeyed through the fatty, sporty, vain, criminal, brainy and scared lands, we not only got the girls' staples of peril and adversity (with some handy moral lessons), we got a superb adventure story.

The glory days couldn't last. Tammy swallowed both Misty and Jinty, and itself disappeared for good in 1984. Over at DC Thomson, the cheaper photo stories gradually took over from artwork strips, and it was all boys and pop stars and trendiness. Oh, there was still good stuff - Bunty's 1995 minor classic, The Boyfriend from Blupo (top) featured the best ever example of 'carpe diem', when heroine Lee, desperate to find a date for the school disco, propositions the alien boy whose space ship has just crashed in front of her.

But Bunty - the first and the last - finally disappeared in 2001, and that was it for 'proper' girls' comics. No one wants them any more (every now and again I do the rounds of publishers, but artwork is too expensive, there's no readership, and no advertisers for such a product, they say). But I'm sure there are still days like any other going on out there, with dangerous road tankers on the loose. And maybe one day we'll be able to read about them again.

Trivia

Characters in Bunty were frequently seen to be reading Bunty the comic, but never commented on the fact that their lives were being laid out in pictures inside.

Statistics show that you're most likely to get your own story in a girls' comic if you're a sporty, disabled, artistic Victorian orphan who lives with a violent aunt or uncle, having a hurt sister/brother/pet who you need to earn money for, but don't realize that your best friend secretly resents you, the snobs are plotting against you, and an evil mastermind is attempting to take over your school and you're the only one who can resist her powers. However, this will count for nothing if your name doesn't lend itself to a clever titular pun.

Over forty-three years (Jan 1958 to Feb 2001), Bunty's The Four Marys went through several looks, lots of school halls and a change of headmistress, but the girls stayed in the Third Form throughout. The Four Marys, from 1958 and from 2001

In the Nineties, DC Thomson's Mandy and Judy became the trendier-sounding M&J, while Bunty's title character, Bunty, became known simply as 'B'.

Bunty's back page 'cut-out wardrobe' may have made many little girls grow up to be fashion designers, but is the bane of collectors who want to find pristine copies of comics…

For a while in the Eighties, Tammy listed writers and artists for its strips. Suddenly we could discuss the gloriously detailed art of Jose Casanovas, and the simple, elegant style of Guy Peeters. We knew that Benita Brown wrote Tomorrow Town, and Jake Adams wrote ET Estate, and wondered if they'd written the sci-fi classics of the past...

Judy's 'Nothing Ever Goes Right!' epitomised the girls' comics' love of tragedy. After a series of disasters, the last episode saw heroine Heather ending up in an unnamed grave.

'Tamara Townsend is forced to join a secret legion of girl slaves known as "Ants", whose leader, the Grand Termite, plans to make himself master of the world.' Other evil masterminds hypnotized girls to swim oceans, turned girls into plants, and were really keen on ballet.

'Marian Lowther, an orphan and millionairess, was delicate and very bored with life until she made friends with her new cook's daughter, Joan Coombes. The pair began to collect autographs…' and became the original stalkers. This Bunty pair, with unlimited money and seemingly no shame, should have been locked up.

Karen, The Loneliest Girl in the World, should have watched Doctor Who - could the Kraals have been behind her ordeal?

'A talent for matchstick models - that's all that made life worthwhile for Sadie.' And despite the best efforts of her evil guardian, Sadie in the Sticks managed to make £50 plus a time for them, which was pretty impressive for the Seventies.

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History of Comic Books Written by the Losers

Around a century after their inception, comic books remain popular due to the ardor of their fans and the hard work of writers, artists, and editors. But in the vast universe of graphic literature, there exists an oft-overlooked group of dedicated individuals who devote their ample free time to collecting, debating, and publishing the minutiae of the funny book genre. They are the losers who write sequential art’s rich and storied history.

Twenty-eight year-old Carstairs Bagly, Jr. spends a Friday night cataloging his comic book collection on a computer spreadsheet. "Charlton comics are about more than just a third rate, mob-connected publishing grind-house and it's certainly about more than Steve Ditko or early Jim Aparo and John Byrne artwork," said Bagly, Jr., a comic book historian. "The blasted heath where once stood the ancient presses in Derby, CN. is full of history, but Charltons are still vibrant right now on ebay. Someone needs to record all the amazing things that went on, even if it means that person will never have a social life."

For Bagly, Jr., comic books are the only topic of conversation and the only form of entertainment. While other men his age go on dates or enjoy the sunlight, Bagly, Jr. haunts the rear corners of local comic shops like Things Your Mother Threw Out, where he squats alone, hunched over long boxes of old and mildewy comics. During the day, he works in his windowless bedroom compiling facts about comic book history for his web site, CavalcadeOfCrap.com.

"Comic books are so important to me," Bagly, Jr. said, gesturing to a mountain of boxes where he files his comics. On a table next to him is a large stack of notebooks of all the internet forums he regularly posts on and detailed transcriptions of interviews with artists and writers whom he has met at comic conventions. "If I couldn't write about comics and collect comics, I have no idea what I'd do instead."

The social misfits who chronicle comic books seek not only to log facts, but also to influence public opinion about obscure comic book issues, something most people care little about. "Joe Lunchpail would say Action #1 by Siegel and Shuster was the first real comic book, but that's dead wrong," said Pfaf Hufnagel, a line cook in Salisbury, MD, who occasionally writes for Geek magazine and has a collection of more than 10,000 comics. "Action #1 just brought the comics to the mainstream. Anyone who knows anything will say the first comic was either Obadiah Oldbuck or The Yellow Kid. Added Hufnagel: "Old Mother and her Funny Kitten was actually printed earlier but due to a distribution problem, was released later, in case you didn't know."

From covering comic books for a local newspaper to distilling comic book's history into an 800-page book, the historians of comic books soldier on, despite their negligible impact on the direction or quality of comics itself."When you're writing comic book history, you have to make some hard choices," said Mulchrome Ditweiller, one of the editors of …For Your Oddball, Weirdo Needs. "Do you give equal space to influential artists like Dan DeCarlo, Herb Trimpe and Mort Lawrence, even though they're not as well known as L. B. Cole, Matt Wagner and Nick Cardy? Making a decision like that can take an entire weekend of soul-searching." "I don't mind, though, because I love comic books," added Ditweiller, slipping a Dotty Dripple and Taffy just to the right of Double Action Comics in the Golden Age section of his comic book collection. "Comic books are just so spontaneous and full of life."

Not all comic book history is comprehensive. Many comic book historians choose to focus on individual artists who can barely tolerate the authors when they meet. In-depth comic book bios have been written about artists ranging from Pat Morisi to Nicholas Alascia, with biographers desperately trying to attain coolness by association with their subjects. "Young Romance was a crucial comic for its time," said Ochiltree Jark, author of Pin-ups, Girl Reporters, Wimmin’s Libbers and Riot Grrrlz: The Adventures Of Women In The 20th Century. In romance comics, the most a woman could aspire to was the position of nurse, private secretary or model. And they always gave it up anyway to get married and become housewives. If you have a couple hours, I'd be happy to talk at you about it."

Although comic book historians provide a valuable service to comic book fanatics, Princeton sociology professor Hutchcock McDolphus said that their focus on comic books hinders their accumulation of knowledge in other areas. "From discussing long-defunct comic book publishers to analyzing the impact of a comics personnel changes, comic book historians cannot see beyond their acne-scarred noses to realize that there are interesting subjects in the world besides comic books," said McDolphus, a self-professed "ex- comic book nerd." "If you ask them who the U.S. attorney general is, or what's going on in the park around the corner, you'll get a blank stare. But ask which philosopher Steve Ditko worshipped at the feet of or who Joe Tuska punched out in the artist’s bullpen, and you'll have to dodge all the flying spittle from everyone trying to be the first to answer."Added McDolphus: "It was Ayn Rand and some prankster…I forget who, exactly."

[comicgrinder]

all I can say is WOW

[Subliminal]

all I can say is WOW

 

All I can say is : I don't read word walls, not even my own

[HouseofComics.Com]

Added Hufnagel: "Old Mother and her Funny Kitten was actually printed earlier but due to a distribution problem, was released later, in case you didn't know."

[aardvark88]

Think you covered most everything except Strawberry Shortcake or the romance photocovers. Sample:

 

[s-man]

Think you covered most everything except Strawberry Shortcake or the romance photocovers. Sample:

 

Those eyes follow you around the room...go ahead, get up and wonder around the room....they....will.....follow........you

[COI]

Please learn from my threads. These people grew up reading comics, so they can't read more than 50 words without the aid of cleavage and spandex.

[s-man]

Please learn from my threads. These people grew up reading comics, so they can't read more than 50 words without the aid of cleavage and spandex.

[Blind Owl]

Excellent reading...

 

I don't collect Romance comics. but I've owned a few...

 

Certainly I agree that when the 60's happened, writers were behind the times...

 

Things were changing so quickly they could not keep up... The music industry was changing yearly...and fashion was the same...

 

These kind of comics are under appreciated most of time....but as you mentioned most of time they were laughable too.

 

Regardless they are a part of the culture, and very collectible...

 

Now if you talk about St. John romance...that's a different criteria...

 

Hail Matt Baker...

[llll-migration]

THX, all.

 

Except, needs pichurs/diagrams/masked magically smart incantations/flaming beat-downs, etc.

[TupennyConan]

I knew you had something to say since the day you joined the Boards.

 

Thank you for your posts.

[mica]

Princeton sociology professor Hutchcock McDolphus said ...

Hutchcock McDolphus

 

I wish shills were allowed. That would be a great name for one.

[JvR11]

Why British Girls' Comics Were Wonderful

 

Do you have some interior and exterior pictures you could share of the Brit comics from the 50's?

[VintageComics]

GREAT POST.

 

[TupennyConan]

 

Will we see these in the New Yorker, Harper's, or the Atlantic Monthly?

 

 

[TupennyConan]

IIII (Black Flag as I like to call you),

 

Your post is superior to most in all respects (& I've never even read a romance book) & yet it only sports 235 views.

 

I'll post the jumbo epigraph below to support my commentary.

 

This place has become so effed up it isn't even funny.

 

We have a bunch people posting in what seems like every single thread when there is absolutely no point at all. I think coincidentally a small group of attention mongers has turned up here all at the same time, and because there are more than one of them, they have each other to fall back on.

 

We have people complaining about sellers that don't contribute anywhere else only coming here to sell there product, even though most of those sellers are long time members that used to contribute quite often. They probably don't contribute any longer since a decent topic can barely be noticed before it is bumped five pages back, because of 100 usless pages of nothing in a welcome to the boards thread.

 

Some folks think that a high post count makes you a valuable member. Further more, some people think they got it all figured out an want to govern the place just because they have amassed a useless bunch of posts in a short period of time.

 

This place is so effed up that here I am agreeing with JC and Awe4one in this thread.