The Two-Dimensional Thrill of Romance!

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. I keep a couple of DC romance comics on my spinner rack — there among the superheroes, the monsters and the space explorers — just to create the effect of some newsstand in 1960. 
My friend Patty Poulter introduced me to this intriguing blog about romance comics, one of the genres that as created to replace superheroes when they "retired" after World War II, evil presumably having been defeated at last. 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 go hit so hard."

Humor, romance and super heroics: Archie Andrews becomes Pureheart the Powerful