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.
Jack Kirby and Joe Simon inspired
the trend with Young Romance (Sept.–Oct.
1947). The first issue, purportedly aimed at “The More ADULT Readers of
Comics,” sold 92 percent of its print run.
The 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 title from EC Comics. 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.
It occurs to me that I find
romance comics kind of silly and superhero comics kind of serious, and that that
attitude is, in itself, sublimely silly.
It also occurs to me that my
ambivalence 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 go hit so hard.”
This new stylized, abbreviated, four-color
medium first offered individual combat and the triumph of justice. Then it
offered anguished relationships and the fulfillment of yearning. The popularity
of both genres proved that the ten-cent fantasy was to become a permanent
feature of the American landscape.
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