The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1654: Haunted Love #3, April 2016

Not quite the same as the old Charlton title, this series, edited by the talented Craig Yoe, collects some very strange and gruesome love stories from the pre-Code days. It's interesting to contrast these stories with some of the later horror stuff - I've been reading, though not blogging, some of the old Marvel reprints from the 70s, Creatures on the Loose and Vault of Evil and such. There's just something a little more neutered about those later stories. So much happens off-panel, or almost happens but then doesn't, whereas the old stories just go all out. While the sexual politics of virtually every story are pretty shady, the art and the willingness to take the stories to extremes is really lovely.

Well, not lovely. Gross, really. But that's what we come to these old comics for.

"I'm glad you value it, my dear husband. Then, perhaps, you won't mind when it cracks your skull wide open! I can wait no longer for you to die!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 715: Hot Stuff, The Little Devil #115, March 1973

I don't really have much to say about this one. Hot Stuff, and his pal Casper, have never really resonated with me. Much like their comrade Richie Rich, these characters inhabit a very strange, decidedly surreal world. There are countries that bear no resemblance whatsoever to our own world, and a plethora of weird and wonderful creatures that everyone seems to take completely in stride. Hot Stuff visits a land where there's bizarre weather that changes on an almost minutely basis (it's called Calgary), yet no one reacts to the fact that he's literally a tiny devil. They just talk to him like that's a thing that happens.

I think that Harvey comics is probably one of the most underrepresented publishers in my collection. I like Richie Rich well enough when I was young, though I definitely skewed more to Archie. And I was raised on Doctor Who comics, so the children's stuff that Harvey, or Dell, produced just never seemed to draw me in. I'll get to it eventually, as I will with all things in the collection, but it just doesn't really call to me.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 714: Time For Love #38, September 1974

I read an issue of this series earlier last year and was thoroughly underwhelmed with it. The art was quite lovely, as is most of the art from 70s romance comics, but the stories were horrendous sexist programming that told young ladies they had to give up everything for their man, leap at the first marriage proposal that was offered, and always be really, really pretty.

Today's comic breaks from that slightly. The art is still excellent. And the characters all wear that CW level of prettiness. But there's a couple of stories in which the female lead wrestles with her feelings, rather than leaping straight into them, pondering whether or not what she feels is actually love or simply a brief infatuation. Which, I think, is a rather intelligent way of looking at relationships, occasionally. The best part of the comic, however, was the "Teen-Age Troubles" advice column, in which young women sent letters to Dr. Harold Gluck. There's a little more information about him here at the wonderful Sequential Crush. The young lady who wrote in was complaining of a weight problem that was keeping her from getting dates. Dr. Gluck's advice was rather excellent, as he stressed that before she plunged into some diet, she seek advice from a doctor. He even goes so far as to say that weight isn't necessarily a problem if one accepts one's own body. Forward thinking advice for the 70s, I think.

I think we need to see some contemporary romance comics, ones that tell a compelling story without devolving into stereotypical portrayals. Any artists out there want to collaborate with me? (I'm pretty sure "Stick Person Romance" would not be a success.)

To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 534: Our Love Is Real, 2011

(Slight break. Packing to get ready for our trip home - will get back to the last two Batman Incorporated tales tomorrow.)

Soooo.....this is sort of a romance comic. In that it's about a riot cop who's married to a dog who meets a person married to a crystal while quelling a riot by vegisexuals, a group of people fighting for the right to marry and have sexual relations with plants.

It's funny. I got to the end of that sentence above, and realized that, truthfully, I shouldn't have to say anything else about this comic. That pretty much says it all.

Well, maybe a little more. Sam Humphries is a pretty good writer. I've enjoyed his recent work on New Avengers, and I didn't really know what to expect from this comic. It's bizarre and brutal and irreverent, and I can't tell if it's championing the right to choose who we love, if it's critiquing the rampant splintering and diversifying of sexual identifications, or if it's doing both, at the same time, and basically just satirizing people.

I kind of hope it's all three. And Steven Sanders can draw the hell out of a fight sequence, especially when that sequence involves many boots to many faces.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 427: I ❤ Marvel: Marvel Ai #1, April 2006 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 7)

To finish things off this week, and in keeping with my inclusion of Krypto in my kids' comics week, here's a romance comic about superheroes! You knew I couldn't go a full week without talking about them somehow, right?

As the title page says, Ai is Japanese for love. Each tale, scripted by C.B. Cebulski, is drawn by a different manga artist, and I have to say, the variety of styles is wonderful. It is both strangely off-putting and enticing to see the Wasp and Black Widow acting like lovestruck teens in a Shoujo reimagining of the Scarlet Witch and the Vision's first date. Well, Janet I can imagine, but Natasha collapsing on a bed with hearts in her eyes as she hears about the first kiss is....well, it's hard to imagine her assassinating people at a moment like that. The Medusa/Black Bolt story is just utterly gorgeous:

There is a problem with the story, though. Well, not actually the story, but the interruptions. I've come to appreciate the comics where the ads are placed at the end of the story, rather than interrupting the action. This story is very tender and quiet, about Medusa and her relationship with a man whose voice she can never hear. There's a quiet lovely scene of the two in bed, lying in one another's arms after making love, and we turn the page to find....A GIANT DOUBLE-PAGE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE SPIDER-MAN PLUG & PLAY VIDEO GAME SYSTEM!!!! And then on to the final page of the story. I don't know if there's a rule about how far into a comic ads have to run, especially when they're external ones, but whoever put this comic together was obviously not thinking about the story. And then, after this single final page, the facing page is a creepy as hell ad for the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, featuring a woman's head being held down by a hand that appears to be wearing a glove made of skin. Absolutely, of course, the sort of thing you want to see in a comic that's about romance and comedy.

The last story is a silent one, sort of, about Elektra and Black Widow fighting over who gets to be Daredevil's girl. It ends with them both seeing Matt Murdock with (I assume) Karen Page, and hurling their respective weapons at him. In this universe, Matt Murdock is very, very dead.

I've had a lot more fun reading romance comics than I thought I would. As I mentioned at the beginning of the week, it's the genre that has perhaps the lowest representation in my collection, but I think that that's something that needs to be remedied. I admit to enjoying the genre-mashing titles a little more, but even the straight ahead romance stories (and especially the ones reprinted from Standard comics in True Love) were enjoyable. Well, mostly ;P.

Tomorrow.....I have three more genre-specific week-long stacks to read. Western, War, and Erotica. Come back tomorrow to find out which one gets read next! Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 426: True Love #1, January 1986 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 6)

As with yesterday's comic, this one is a reprint of old romance stories, though without the re-scripting. A collection of tales from Standard Comics in the 1950s, featuring some of the luminaries of the industry, these stories are a welcome break from the heart-wrenching, angst-filled stories of teenage heartache. These are stories of what comes next, of the "happily ever after," and how it can oftentimes be just as difficult as early romantic entanglements. Which is probably, as someone whose been married for 20 years, why this comic appealed to me more than most I've read this week. As someone who understands the kind of daily work involved in being in love, and loving, it's nice to see such subjects given a good treatment.

Even more, one of the stories in this issue features a woman who can fix a car, and doesn't take shit from a mopey man with whom she has a relationship. There's even a gentle-yet-heavy-handed exploration of PTSD in the wake of the Korean war, which offers an interesting perspective form which to start thinking about these sorts of romance comics. Industry creators have, for a long time, claimed that one can tell grown up stories using a medium that is far too often associated with children's literature, and these stories offer evidence. Instead of relegating the medium to one that is only useful for action stories, we see from this sampling that creators were trying to tell stories about the things that move us, and that we are moved by, in our daily lives - not unlike most serious, literary authors. True Love shows us that there are romance stories for grown-ups, even if the cultural mores of the 1950s leak through a little too prevalently sometimes.

Also as with yesterday's comic, I read the opening text feature, which revealed where these comics had originally appeared. It was nice to see acknowledgement of the fact that most of these stories were written by men for women, and that that opens up the stories to a slew of critical problems, but I found that, by and large, they treated women with far more respect and interest than the teen romances I've been reading this week. True Love was a 2-issue mini-series, and I think I'll be looking for the second issue for another sampling of these thoughtful stories.

One last thing - the cover does not have anything to do with the interior. It's beautiful, as is most of Dave Stevens' work, but it's actually the promotional blurb on the inside front cover that I find amusing. It calls this work "An unmistakable gem of a cover." Noting the pink hair of the lady on the poster, I can only imagine it's a shout-out to Jem and the Holograms, which was first airing around the time this comic came out. Eclipse always was a clever comics publisher.

Last day, tomorrow, and something a little different. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 425: Last Kiss #2, August, 2001 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 5)

You should go to John Lustig's "Last Kiss" site and read his comics.

I'll make an admission: I don't usually read text pieces in the comics I blog. I'll have a peep at "Stan's Soapbox" every now and again, or let my eyes wander over a letters page or two, but generally I'm more interested in the comics stories themselves. But with this comic, I thought maybe getting some context would be helpful. Let me explain.

Last Kiss is a romance comic, to be sure, but it's a romance comic with a twist (and that's a bit twisted!). John Lustig, apparently, bought the rights to a Charlton romance comic called First Kiss, and subsequently started re-scripting and manipulating them and making them into ironic 21st century parodies of the original pieces. This is not to say that he is not reverent of the source material - in some ways, in order to really skewer something, you have to love it a lot. This issue featured work by renowned inker Dick Giordano, even including an original piece scripted and drawn for this issue. The jewel in the crown that is this comic, though, is an interview with Giordano about his time working on romance comics for Charlton. He offers a rather wonderful articulation of the differences between drawing a superhero story and a romance story, and why, as an artist, he finds them interesting. I'd never really put together that there are different artistic vocabularies depending on the genre one is working in. Giordano notes that a romance comic is about subtlety and emotion, rather than action and hyperbole. It's one of those things that, of course, makes sense after the fact, but that I'd never thought of before.

So, much as the comics sections of this issue were funny, and I enjoyed them, the interview with Giordano was the best bit. Perhaps I'll have to start paying a bit more attention to text pieces in future.

Moving on, almost done our week of romance. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 424: Time for Love #42, June 1975 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 4)

Well, for a comic about one of the most powerful emotions humans feel, this was a thoroughly underwhelming piece. I'm beginning to see the differences between a good romance comic and a bad one, and the bad ones appear to end EVERY SINGLE STORY with the heroine getting a marriage proposal. In the 70s, it seems, one could not fall in love without it immediately becoming the greatest love of all time that will last forever.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you see right through the veil and understand the kind of programming that's been going on in culture for centuries? I had it with this comic. It teaches young girls everything that is completely wrong with society. Get a job as a secretary, have an affair with the boss, meet/fall in love/get married as quickly as humanly possible, because that's obviously the most fulfilling aspect of the female experience.

*sigh*

Okay, okay, think positive. There's some decent art in this issue. I have to admit that the fashions from the 70s are great, partially for their kitsch factor, and partially for their coolness. But the stories. Good grief.

On to something a little different tomorrow - a reprint series that removes the dialogue from old romance comics, and replaces it with more....ironic?....speech. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 423: Haunted Love #2, June 1973 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 3)

I don't know why I'm surprised to find such big-name creators working on a romance title from Charlton. I always forget that Charlton was a force to be reckoned with for some time in the late 70s and early 80s. I also have to work past that bias I have that superheroes are intrinsically the height of work for creators in comics. I know I would hate to do one thing for work for the rest of my life, so why should those involved in comics be any different? In fact, I can think of one or two contemporary professionals who should take a *cough cough Geoff Johns* break from superheroes for a bit, before one or both of them dies a horrendous death.

(Oops. Too late, DC Comics.)

Today's comic got me thinking about story lengths. There's two stories in this issue. The first, "Richard," is 8 pages long, and the second, "I'll Never Let You Go," is twice that. But "Richard" is a far superior tale. There's an odd juxtaposition of early 20th century-style clothing and seventies dialogue, but Staton's art is gorgeous, and Cuti's script is tightly-paced and plotted. (Also, Cuti produced a strange little underground comix series called Moonie that I am now hunting for, because it looks fucking bizarre.) There's even a rather lovely twist in the story in that the final teary love-revelation comes between two brothers, one deceased but still watching over his sibling, rather than the usual innocent waif and her hunky man. This offers a nice juxtaposition with the second story, though that's really the only interesting thing about it, in my opinion. "Never" is a cliched story of a woman whose bad-boy boyfriend dies in a car crash, and continues to haunt her even after she marries a nice guy (see that cover up there? That's literally all you need to know). The art is competent, but pales in comparison to Staton's work. Perhaps it would have been wiser to lead with this story so that the really stellar piece would end the comic. There's some nice use of flashback sequences, but, as with a number of the stories I've read over the last couple of days, the ending is just ridiculously rushed. The husband goes from not believing his wife to seeing and combating the ghost in the space of maybe 2 panels (and not two "a year passes" panels), and we're never given a good explanation as to why the ghost seemed to have been attracted to the house that eventually burns down (as they do), rather than the woman he was ostensibly haunting.

And so I wonder if the length of the piece allowed for too many extraneous details. Maybe we didn't need the flashbacks. Maybe this piece would have worked better as a short story, concentrating on the space and the setting and the situation, rather than the history, of the characters. Those other stories I mentioned above, with the rapid endings, are often ones of just this nature, regardless of the history of the characters we read about, and the stretch of time that becomes important in the tales is the one that comes "happily ever after" the end of the story. The effective romance stories, I'm finding, are the ones that tell the tale of the moment of love, rather than its history.

He said, having read probably less than 10 romance comics in his life. I guess we'll see over the next few days if my hypothesis is born out.

For those who might be interested, here's Nicola Cuti's Moonie at Comixjoint (which I've just discovered and it's amazing). More romance tomorrow. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 422: Our Love Story #1, October 1969 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 2)

When I first put together these week-long looks at different genres of the periodical comics medium, it was in an effort to branch out from the the fantastical genres I've privileged for most of my time as a reader and collector. In the coming weeks, we'll look at westerns, at war comics, at horror comics, at erotica...basically at anything other than superheroes, science fiction, or fantasy comics, which seem to be the primary imaginative modes communicated through comics. Of all of these different genres, romance comics is the one that I have the fewest of, and that I've always had the least interest in. This week is partially about trying to figure that out.

It's not that I'm not a fan of romance. I've been married for 20 years, so romance is a part of my daily existence - it's an integral part of making a loving relationship work for that many years. And when I'm presented with a romantic situation in a television show, or a superhero comic, or anywhere, really, as long as it's handled with care and aplomb, and is relevant and faithful to the story within which it is occurring (as with any situation in any story, really), it's a useful and enriching aspect to said story.

But a comic devoted solely to romance? A little more difficult, I think. I've become trained to see romantic developments as an aspect of stories, but not a focus of stories in and of itself. Even in the scant number of romance novels I've read, there's other generic elements brought in to enrich the story. And in other comics I read, romance is brought in to enhance the story. So what I need to begin to recognize in these comics is that the primary communicative genre is romance, and any other genres that show up are going to be heavily inflected by that primary genre. Case in point, the story "Why did I lose you, my love?" in today's issue. A young woman is forlorn over the cool treatment she receives from a boyfriend returned from being away at school. She encounters him with friends at a cafe, and is given the cold shoulder by all of them. Though only a 7-page story, elements of the mystery genre pervade the story, mingling fluidly with the romantic angle. There's lots of flashback, monologue, memories that ought to be sepia-toned, and lurking in shadows, looking for clues. Yet all of these elements, which might convey the primary mood of the story in a mystery comic, are background details to the story of a broken heart here. We tend to separate stories by genre, by the primary communicative or atmospheric inflection present, but an important thing to recognize is that it's possible, and often probable, for other genres to be present in these works, subsumed by the primary genre of a piece.

Excuse me while I intellectualize romance a bit. *sigh* Academics....

One further thing that fascinated me about this comic was the "Suzan Says..." advice column. Having come across a number of such columns in various Archie comics, I was curious as to Suzan's genesis. I was surprised to find that she was an actual person, Suzan Loeb, hired as a (feminists, cover your eyes!) "Girl Friday" at Marvel Comics in the late 60s. For a wonderful interview with her (and a super-cool blog about romance comics) have a look here, at Sequential Crush.

And speaking of other genres, we'll look tomorrow at a comic that is subtitled "Gothic Romance." How do elements of horror mesh with the romance genre in comics? We're quite familiar with this notion nowadays (thanks, Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer), but comics have been mucking about in this fusion of genres for almost half a century now. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 421: Girls' Love Stories #178, August 1973 ("Wuv, twue wuv" Week, Day 1)

Two things before we begin - a shiny, Giant Box of Comics No-Prize to the first person who tells me where this week's subtitle comes from. Second, today is April 20 (Happy 4/20, all), and yesterday was day 420 of the project. Missed it by one day.

Unfortunately, my copy of this comic is in so much worse condition than the cover scan above. So much so, in fact, that I'm missing the middle 8 pages, and never will find out how things work out for the young lady being swept off her feet by the skull-wearing biker up there. Welcome to Romance Comics week! I have a grand total of 12 romance comics (according to my genre listing) in my collection, so this week we're going to look at more than half of them. That's a little depressing, I think, though if today's comic is any indication, it's a bit of a mixed blessing not having more. At least, not having more from the 70s, like this comic. Now, I was but a twinkle in my parents' eyes when this comic came out (actually, I was more like a zygote in my mother's womb, but that's less poetic), but did every woman who fell for some dude she crashed into in the park, or met on the street on her first day in New York, go to his home and cook him a steak? Where are all the vegetarian men?

The stories, as you can imagine, are mired in a time when women were this weird mixture of homemaker and what comics writers thought feminists were, and men were....actually, in this comic, men are sex objects. It's an odd juxtaposition, in that the men in the comics take what, at the time, is traditionally the female place, that of the eye candy, and the women are balls of barely-controlled lust and June Cleaver-style life goals. So in at least one way, in acknowledging the desires of women (Emilia would be so proud, boys), this comic is sort of (I emphasize, sort of) forward thinking. I think the best practice for reading such works, though, is to have a soccer ball-sized grain of salt handy at all times.

What I do thank this comic for is for introducing me to the art of Jay Scott Pike, who illustrated (according to the GCD) the first story. He's got a semi-Carmine Infantino thing going on, but with slightly less stylization happening. He apparently was also a well-regarded "Good Girl" pin-up artist (a genre I have a weakness for), so I'm happy to have a new artist to explore and discover.

This week's comics are from a span of about 50 years, so it'll be interesting to see what's changed in romance comics, and what hasn't. In the early days, young women were the target demographic (imagine a comics industry that actually targeted young women - madness!!), and I'm curious to see if something like the I [Heart] Marvel Marvel Ai issue I'll be reading this week still targets that group. Can't men like romance too?

Onward!