April 1958: Vulnerability and Vice Versa

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.”

June 1951: When Romance Was Young…

Jack Kirby and Joe Simon kicked off the romance comics trend with Young Romance (Sept.–Oct. 1947). The first issue sold 92 percent of its print run.  

The Prize Comics title was shortly selling a million copies a month, a figure guaranteed to inspire a whole genre devoted to the themes of “…romantic love and its attendant complications such as jealousy, marriage, divorce, betrayal and heartache,” Wikipedia noted.

The swiftness of the shift in the combat-weary public’s tastes is illustrated by a single EC Comics title. Moon Girl and the Prince, starring a Wonder Woman-ish super heroine, debuted in the fall of 1947. By the 9th issue, in October 1949, the comic book was retitled A Moon, A Girl … Romance.

“Teen comedy series like Archie had been around for a few years and occasionally had romantic story lines and subplots,” observed University of South Carolina librarian Michael Weisenburg.

“Romance pulps and true confession magazines had been around for decades. But a comic dedicated to telling romantic stories hadn’t been done before. 

“With the phrase ‘Designed for the More Adult Readers of Comics’ printed on the cover, Simon and Kirby signaled a deliberate shift in expectations of what a comic could be.”

“Grounded in artistic and narrative realism, romance comics were remarkably different from their superhero and sci-fi peers. While the post-war popularity of romance comics only lasted a few years, these love stories ended up actually having a strong influence on other genres.”

“Even after romance comics largely fell out of fashion, the genre’s visual tropes and narrative themes became more prevalent during what’s known as the ‘Silver Age,’ a superhero revival that lasted from 1956 to 1970. Titles such as Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane often borrowed heavily from romance for their plots.”

I always keep a few DC romance comics on my spinner rack, just to mimic the effect of what the experience of visiting a newsstand was really like in the 1960s.