I always keep a couple of DC
romance comics on my prized spinner rack — there among the superheroes, the
monsters, the machine-gunner GIs and the spacemen — in order to mimic the
actual effect of some newsstand in 1960.
Romance was a fresh sales gimmick
created to supplant superheroes when they “retired” after World War II, evil
presumably having been finally vanquished.
It occurs to me that I find
romance comics kind of silly and superhero comics kind of serious, and that
that fact in itself is sublimely silly.
It also occurs to me that my
nervousness about the genre may have had something to do with the fact that
romance comics tend to be about weakness and vulnerability, while superhero
comics are of course about uncanny strength. So more than gender separated
those two audiences.
Yet just scratch the surface, and
you find that all stories about strength are necessarily also about weakness,
and vice versa.
“A sissy wanted girls who scorned
him; a man scorned girls who wanted him,” wrote Jules Feiffer, recalling the
attitudes of the superheroes’ first fanboys in the 1930s and 1940s. “Our
cultural opposite of the man who didn't make out with women has never been the
man who did — but rather the man who could if he wanted to, but still didn't.
The ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper's, L'il Abner's, or Superman’s,
was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength,
that he need never go near girls. Except to help them. And then get the hell
out.
“Real rapport was not for women.
It was for villains. That's why they got hit so hard.”
Matthew Grossman wrote, "I find romance comics unreadable also.
ReplyDeleteThat said, being a comic fan has helped me have empathy and respect for other people’s ridiculous entertainment preferences, whether we’re talking Hallmark movies, Professional Wrestling, or Sex and the City."
Joan Ormrod wrote, "Marvel brought psychological vulnerability to superhero comics. But pat mills who edited 2000ad said that the emotions in girls comics were harder to write as problems weren't easily solved with fists. A lot of great comics writers like Moore and Morrison cut their teeth on girls comics. It's only the hierarchies in culture that make girls comics and romance seem slighter than war and violence."
ReplyDeletePhilip Rushton wrote, "That certainly applies to British girls' comics (though off hand I can't think of any written by Morrison), but for the most part America never really had an equivalent to young female adventure comics like School Friend, Bunty, Tammy, etc. In my experience - in spite of honorable exceptions by Simon & Kirby - US comic books tended to settle into a formulaic and stereotyped diet of Romance stories where the scripting rarely compared to the quality of the artwork."
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