Romance comics: Difference between revisions
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With the implementation of the [[Comics Code]] in [[1954 in comics|1954]], romance comics publishers self-censored any material that might be interpreted as controversial and opted to play it safe with stories focusing on traditional patriarchial concepts of female behavior, gender roles, love, sex, and marriage. The genre fell into decline and disrepute during the [[sexual revolution]], and the genre's Golden Age came to an end when ''Young Romance'' and its companion title ''[[Young Love]]'' ceased publication in [[1975 in comics|1975]] and [[1977 in comics|1977]] respectively. |
With the implementation of the [[Comics Code]] in [[1954 in comics|1954]], romance comics publishers self-censored any material that might be interpreted as controversial and opted to play it safe with stories focusing on traditional patriarchial concepts of female behavior, gender roles, love, sex, and marriage. The genre fell into decline and disrepute during the [[sexual revolution]], and the genre's Golden Age came to an end when ''Young Romance'' and its companion title ''[[Young Love]]'' ceased publication in [[1975 in comics|1975]] and [[1977 in comics|1977]] respectively. |
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In the new millenium, a few publishers flirted with the genre in various ways including [[manga]]-styled romance comics based on [[Harlequin Enterprises|Harlequin]] novels |
In the new millenium, a few publishers flirted with the genre in various ways, including [[manga]]-styled romance comics based on [[Harlequin Enterprises|Harlequin]] novels and Golden Age classics revamped with snarky dialogue. |
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== Origin == |
== Origin == |
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Revision as of 05:33, 25 March 2010
| Romance comics | |
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| The front cover of 'Romantic Picture Novelettes' depicts a young man and woman sitting beneath a willow tree on a moonlit evening. The one-shot Romantic Picture Novelettes (1946) is a collection of Mary Worth strip reprints, and is sometimes considered the first romance comic book. | |
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Romance comics (sometimes love comics) is a comics genre depicting romantic love and its attendant complications such as jealousy, marriage, divorce, betrayal, and heartache. The term usually refers to an American comic books genre published through the first three decades of the Cold War era (1947-1977). Romance comics stories are generally about the love lives of older high school teens and young adults and are set in contemporary America.
The origins of romance comics lie in the years immediately following World War II when adult comics readership increased and superheroes were dismissed as passé. Influenced by the pulps, radio soap operas, slick newspaper comic strips such as Mary Worth, and adult confession magazines, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Young Romance launched the comic book genre in 1947 to resounding success. By the early 1950s, dozens of romance titles from major comics publishers were on the newsstands and drug store racks.
With the implementation of the Comics Code in 1954, romance comics publishers self-censored any material that might be interpreted as controversial and opted to play it safe with stories focusing on traditional patriarchial concepts of female behavior, gender roles, love, sex, and marriage. The genre fell into decline and disrepute during the sexual revolution, and the genre's Golden Age came to an end when Young Romance and its companion title Young Love ceased publication in 1975 and 1977 respectively.
In the new millenium, a few publishers flirted with the genre in various ways, including manga-styled romance comics based on Harlequin novels and Golden Age classics revamped with snarky dialogue.
Origin
American romance comics had their origin in the years immediately following World War II when hip comics readers found crime-busting superheroes in tights and trunks a thing of the past. Adult comics readership had grown during the war years and returning servicemen wanted sex, violence, and humor in their comics. The genre took its immediate inspiration from the romance pulps, confession magazines such as True Story, radio soap operas, and newspaper comic strips that focused on love, domestic strife, and heartache, such as Rex Morgan, M.D. and Mary Worth. Historian Ron Goulart nominates the 1946 one-shot comic Romantic Picture Novelettes, a collection of Mary Worth newspaper reprints, as the first romance comic book.[1]
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby
Aside from that one-time publication of comic-strip reprints, romance as a comic-book genre was the brainchild of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, two comics artists known for their superheroes, such as Captain America, and their kid gangs, such as the Young Allies. Simon was serving in the United States Coast Guard when he got the idea for romance comics: "I noticed there were so many adults, the officers and men, the people in the town, reading kid comic books. I felt sure there should be an adult comic book." Simon developed the idea with sample covers and title pages and called his brainchild Young Romance, the "Adult Comic Book". Simon later noted he chose the love genre because "it was about the only thing that hadn't been done."[1]
After the service, Simon teamed-up with his former partner Jack Kirby, and the two developed a first-issue mock-up of Young Romance.[2] Bill Draut and other artists participated, with Simon and Kirby producing the scripts because "we couldn't afford writers." Rather than the dramatic comic strips, Simon took his inspiration from the darker-toned confession magazines such as True Story from Macfadden Publications.[1]
The finished book was delivered to Crestwood general manager Maurice Rosenfeld. Crestwood owners Mike Bleir and Teddy Epstein were enthusiastic and worked out a 50% arrangement with the creators.[2] Profit sharing was unusual at the time, and Kirby later noted he and his partner were, in fact, the first to receive percentages.[1]
The first issue of Young Romance was cover-dated September-October 1947, and beneath the title bore the tagline "Designed For The More ADULT Readers of Comics". The title sold 92% of its print run. With the third issue, Crestwood increased the print run to triple the initial number of copies.[3] Circulation jumped to 1,000,000 copies per title. Initially published bimonthly, Young Romance quickly became a monthly title and generated the spin-off, Young Love — together the two titles sold two million copies per month.[2] Kirby noted the books "made millions."[1] The two titles were later joined by Young Brides and In Love, the latter "featuring full-length romance stories".[3]
Subsequent publications
Timely/Marvel brought the second romance title to newsstands with My Romance in August 1948, and Fox Feature Syndicate released the third title, My Life, in September 1948. Fawcett Publications followed with Sweethearts (the first monthly title) in October 1948.[4] By 1950, more than 150 romance titles were on the newsstands from Quality Comics, Avon, Lev Gleason Publications, and DC Comics. Fox Feature Syndicate published over two dozen love comics with 17 featuring "My" in the title—My Desire, My Secret, My Secret Affair, et al.[1]
Romance comics did impressively well commercially, but negatively impacted the sales of superhero comics and confession magazines. True Story admitted their sales were being hurt by the upstart romance comics. In the August 22, 1949 issue of Time, a report indicated that love comics were "outselling all others, even the blood and thunder variety [...] For pulp magazines the moral was even clearer: no matter how low their standards for fiction, the comics could find lower ones."[1]
Decline and Golden Age demise
Following the implementation of the Comics Code in 1954, publishers of romance comics self-censored the content of their publications, making the stories bland and innocent with the emphasis on traditional patriarchial concepts of women's behavior, gender roles, domesticity, and marriage. When the sexual revolution questioned the values promoted in romance comics, along with the decline in comics in general, romance comics began their slow fade. DC Comics, Marvel Comics and Charlton Comics carried a few romance titles into the middle 1970s, but the genre never regained the level of popularity it once enjoyed. The heyday of romance comics came to an end with the last issues of Young Romance and Young Love in the middle 1970s.[1]
Charlton and DC artist and editor Dick Giordano stated in 2005: "[G]irls simply outgrew romance comics [...] [The content was] too tame for the more sophisticated, sexually liberated, women's libbers [who] were able to see nudity, strong sexual content, and life the way it really was in other media. Hand holding and pining after the cute boy on the football team just didn't do it anymore, and the Comics Code wouldn't pass anything that truly resembled real-life relationships."[4]
Aftermath
A few publishers in the 2000s began again producing romance comics. Dark Horse Comics, in conjunction with Harlequin Enterprises, published a new line of romance manga comics, with adaptations of previously published romance novels.[2] The influx of manga into North America carried with it an interest in a wider variety of genre, including romance and erotica, aimed at a young female audience. Harlequin hopes that the manga-styled romance comics will reach a younger audience than the audience of romance novels.[3]
In June 2005, Arrow Publications launched a line of romance webcomics, which are similar in form to the comics of the 1960s and 1970s.[4] In 2006, Adhouse Books published Project: Romantic, an anthology of contemporary romance comics. In 2007, Marvel Comics published several issues of Marvel Romance Redux, an affectionate revamp of their old romance titles, taking pages from them and replacing them with snarky dialogue.
Analysis
The basic formula for the romance comic story was established in Simon and Kirby's Young Romance of 1947. Other scriptwriters, artists, and publishers simply tweaked the formula for a bit of variety. Stories were overwhelmingly written by men from the male perspective, and were narrated by fictional female protagonists who described the dangers of female independence and touted the virtues of domesticity. Young female readers were encouraged to grow up quickly and take on the roles of housewives. Women were depicted as incomplete without a male, but the genre discouraged the aggressive pursuit of men or any behaviors that smacked of promiscuity. Female readers were advised to maintain a passive gender role, or dreams of romance, marriage, and happiness could be kissed good-bye.[5]
Domestic stability was preferable to passion and thrills. Those women who sought exciting outlets were depicted as suffering many disappointments before settling down (finally) to quiet home lives. Careers were discouraged. Working women were depicted as unhappy and unfulfilled because careers complicated relationships and limited chances for marriage. Romance comics made it clear that men were not attracted to working women and were bored with intelligent women.[5]
Men, on the other hand, were depicted as naturally independent and women were expected to accomodate such men even if things appeared a bit suspicious. In one story, a wife suspects her husband of infidelity and leaves him only to discover later she was wrong (according to him). She returns to him and draws the conclusion that "love means faith in the face of any evidence, no matter how overwhelming". As real world young men went off to the Korean War, romance comics emphasized the importance of women waiting unflinchingly, patiently, and chastely for their return.[5]
Romance comics plots were typically formulaic with Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights a seeming inspiration. Many stories of the genre featured a young heroine torn between two suitors: one, a wild Heathcliff type who promised thrills and threatened heartbreak, and the other, a stolid but dull Edgar Linton type who oozed respectability, security, and social acceptance. Adolescent girls could harmlessly indulge their bad boy fantasies in such stories but, in truth, romance comics tried to be democratic in their depiction of bad boys, giving them a softer side and not depicting them as irredeemably bad.[6]
Some plots depicted young women challenging social conventions and the patriarchal authority of fathers and boyfriends. Parental concern found expression in romance comics for what were considered dangerous youth cultural artifacts like rock and roll. In "There's No Love in Rock and Roll" (1956), a defiant teen dates a rock and roll-loving boy but drops him for one who likes traditional adult music—much to her parents' relief.[4] Teen rebellion stories such as "I Joined a Teen-Age Sex Club", "Thrill Seekers' Weekend", and "My Mother was My Rival" were dismissed as "girls' stuff" at a time when crime, horror, and other violent comics were being regarded with suspicion by those concerned with juvenile deliquency and the welfare of the young.[6]
Dating, love triangles, jealousy and other romance-related themes had been a part of teen humor comics before the romance genre swept newsstands. Comics characters such as Archie, Reggie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica and the kids at Riverdale High School being the principal exponents of teen romance. Young Romance, Young Love and their imitators differed from the teen humor comics in that they aspired to realism, using first person narration to create the illusion of verisimilitude, a changing cast of characters in self-contained stories, and heroines in their late teens or early twenties who were closer to the target audience in age than teen humor characters.[7]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g Goulart, Ron (2001). Great American Comic Books. Lincolnwood, Illinois: Publications International, Ltd. pp. 161, 169–172. ISBN 0785355901.
- ^ a b c Simon, Joe (2003). The Comic Book Makers. Vanguard Publications. pp. 123–125. ISBN 1887591354.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ a b Howell, Richard (1988). Real Love: The Best of the Simon and Kirby Romance Comics 1940s-1950s. Eclipse Books. pp. Introduction.
- ^ a b c Nolan, Michelle (2008). Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, Inc. pp. 30, 210. ISBN 978-0-7864-3519-7. Cite error: The named reference "Nolan" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ a b c Wright, Bradford W. (2003). Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 127–133. ISBN 0-80187450-5.
- ^ a b Hajdu, David (2008). The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. pp. 154–174. ISBN 9780374187675.
- ^ Mitchell, Claudia A. (2008). Girl Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. pp. 508–509. ISBN 9780313339080.
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