Comic Media Romances

Repulsive Romance
I've been on a romance comic spree, prowling those wonderful archive sites, Digital Comics Museum and Comic Book Plus, for pre-Code heart throbs. Most 50s romance comics were pretty dreary, enlivened occasionally by a nice art job (Matt Baker hit his stride here). But I certainly found a couple of surprises.

Simon and Kirby are credited with creating the romance comic, inspired by the "confession" magazines which had been around since the twenties. I've no expertise in confession mags, but I've seen enough of them to know that they lured their audience with promises of **SEX**, which the stories delivered in roundabout ways constrained by anti-smut laws. The S and K romance stories weren't that bad. They tended to be more complex and character-driven than later more formulaic tales. Though melodramatic, they were seldom lurid. It was left to copy-cat publishers to go for the gonads with covers promising sex-charged stories. Saint John was great at this; Matt Baker's beautiful covers overflowed with suggestions of cheap pickups, premarital sex, and wild, wild women.

With a few notable exceptions the stories inside seldom delivered the goods. St. John almost always cheated its way out of provocative situations. The girl tells her boyfriend the guy living in her apartment is a jobless acquaintance crashing on the couch--and he really is a jobless acquaintance crashing on her couch (though he turns out to be a worthless freeloader). Recently I ran across a comic that broke the rules. Comic Media's Dear Lonely Hearts offered relatively tame covers, but the stories inside were something else again.

Comic Media was a small publisher remembered today for particularly grisly horror stories and for Pete Morisi's Johnny Dynamite. In the early 1950s they published in a variety of genres, including romance. Comic Media's 1951 title, Dear Lonely Heart (singular) lasted 8 issues and was standard fare. Dear Lonely Hearts (plural) appeared in 1953 and also ran 8 issues. But it was an altogether different kettle of fish. In the four issues currently available you'll find a few "typical" romance stories. The rest combine those staples of 1950s culture, sex and violence against women, to deliver some downright repellent "romances." These stories, narrated by a photostat of the head of a woman whose eyes don't line up, purport to represent a marriage counsellor's typical cases.

Take for example issue 6.

"Pin-Up Girl": Terry is trying to break into modelling, though her fiance doesn't like "everybody staring at you in that bikini thing." She receives a message from the head of a big agency asking to meet at her apartment to discuss business. The agent is rude and aggressive. He insists she change into a bathing suit he's  brought along. Then he asks for more.

When he doesn't get it the agent goes ballistic. It looks like attempted rape. Actually it's attempted murder. As the agent strangles Terry he fantasizes about launching his own career as a serial killer.

Luckily Terry's suspicious fiance shows up with the cops and the real head of the modelling agency. The would-be lady killer was a loony office boy. As the cops drag the fake agent away the real one offers Terry a shot at her modelling career. I don't know if right after the girl was nearly murdered is the best time to talk business, but anyway...strangely for a romance comic, the agent suggests to her fiance that Terry could have both her career and her marriage. This doesn't prevent husband-to-be from rolling out the me-Tarzan line in the final panel.

In "Nightmare Lover": Vicki and Bob are engaged but Bob is getting over a long illness.He's sent to live alone in a remote cabin while he recuperates. (This sounds to me like odd medical practice, but what the heck, this isn't a doctor comic.) Bob writes her every day. Finally Vicki receives a letter asking her to come meet him. Overjoyed, she goes to the cabin. But something's wrong. Bob doesn't give off the old vibe. What's more, he's horny and wants it now. When he insists a bit too hard Vicki figures it out.

That's right: another sex-mad murderer! He's really Dexter Denning, "the finest though unrecognized actor in the world," and he's chucked the real Bob over a cliff. Unlike the fake agent, Denning wants his sex before he gets on with the murdering.

Luckily for Vicki, Bob is alive. He only fell "part way down" the cliff. Vicki's struggling gives Bob time to climb back up and foil Denning's plans. Denning grabs an axe, intending to kill Bob for real. Just then the cops burst in. Denning makes a wild throw with the axe and an odd thing happens:

Gotta watch out for those sharp-bladed rubber axes. The cops haul Denning back to the asylum from which he escaped (beats going to the morgue), remarking that "He ain't a fit sight for a young lady." I guess older ladies are more accustomed to killers with cloven heads. Bob and Vicki end up in a grateful clinch.

Another story in the same vein is "Tea With Terror" from issue 5. Terry (is this the future model from #6?)  takes in a handsome homeless guy and falls for him. Unfortunately he turns out to be a serial rapist/murderer whom the police have been chasing. Luckily the kind cop who took a fancy to her enters just as the killer is about to add Terry to his list.

That issue also offered "Mountain Love," in which a stylish young woman moves to the country to teach school. Her manner of dress scandalizes the gossips and arouses her rural beau. A local Good Guy doctor saves her honor by besting the boyfriend in a fistfight.

By the seventh issue the raping and murdering had waned and the stories were tamer. There were still a few notable oddities, as we'll see in the next post. To close the present tour I offer a condensation of the single weirdest romance story I've ever read: "Price of Passion" from Dear Lonely Hearts #2.

Orphaned at 14, Tess lived on the streets and ended up in the Home for Wayward Girls. She's released into the custody of a rural family consisting of Ma and her two grown sons. Ma, an abusive slave driver, wastes no time in telling Tess where she stands.

Son Luke is a Good Guy who falls in love with Tess. His brother Cole is a glowering brute who's always eyeing the girl from afar. Though she doesn't particularly love Luke, Tess marries him. He promises to raise the town's opinion of her. This makes Cole even more sullen and he stalks Tess constantly. One day in the barn Cole forces himself on her--and Tess loves it.

Only the fact they're both fully dressed suggests they didn't Do It in the hay, but it doesn't matter to Luke, who discovers them and flies into a rage. Whereupon...

Now dig this ending and tell me this isn't one weird romance.

To be honest, to me these things are like a train wreck. The stories are repugnant yet they fascinate me. Who was their intended audience? Can you really see lovesick girls reading this stuff? Did the editor imagine these stories taught some bizarre "moral" message? I realize the cliche of the hero saving the maiden from "the fate worse than death" has been around for ages, but in a romance comic? Strange are the ways of cheap literature.

Storytelling--1

Plus That Script!
In an interview given many years ago, Alex Toth advocated that comic artists should "plus" a script when converting it into drawings. The term comes from animation, and refers to enriching a story by inserting visual bits--background details, poses, actions--that don't appear in the script.

It's similar to what happens in movies. If a scene features two actors talking, the actors seldom just stand there and yak at each other. They'll perform some sort of business that tells something about their character while adding movement to a static scene. For some reason, though comic artists frequently enliven scenes with interesting camera angles, they often don't go much further.

Recently I re-read two stories that showed what a master Toth was at plussing a scene. One was from the 1970s, when he was drawing romance stories for Charlton; the other is a Dell movie adaptation from the late 50s. Before looking at the Toth panel, let's look at a typical dialogue exchange from another story in the same issue. The penciller is Charles Nicholas.
This setup tells the basic story well enough, but the eye-level camera and static poses lend the scene a generic look. The impression isn't helped by the casual background. This room has no personality; it could be any room anywhere. Now let's look at how Toth illustrated a dialogue exchange that could easily have been presented in the same way:Not much happens in this panel. The narrator (a movie star) drives away while her friend and the guy they both love discuss her departure. But the panel is exciting because everything Toth draws gives the scene a unique personality. Instead of a generic house Toth has created a "Bel Air mansion" appropriate to a temperamental movie star. He stages the scene in deep perspective. Matt strikes a dynamic pose we understand without needing to see his face. The star is driving off not in some generic car but an expensive Porsche. Its cockpit is crammed with luggage. All the smaller background details--the shadow of palm trees, the cobblestone street, the tile roof--shout "Southern California Richville." This scene has individuality, and the story is better for it.

Creating well-thought-out backgrounds is a great way to plus a script. Consider this panel from the Dell adaptation of Clint and Mac, a youth-targeted mystery-adventure set in London. It's easy to picture the script for what might have been a throwaway panel. Smith, the guy in the trench coat, returns to his apartment expecting to meet his accomplice Toby. Smith calls out but Toby isn't there. Here's how Toth interpreted the scene:
This panel is an entire book about Smith. As written the character is a typical bad guy without much depth. But when composing this scene Toth asked himself, "Who is Smith? How would he live?" So we see a cheap, impossibly cramped room with wet laundry hung over an old-fashioned stove to dry. A couple of magazines are thrown onto the rumpled bed. He's not a total slob, though: while his clothes are tossed over a chair, his dishes are done. Smith (like Toth) is apparently a car fancier: other than the calendar his only decoration is a print of an old automobile. The blind is pulled halfway down; Smith dislikes either the sunlight or prying neighbors. Smith has become a real person. This is what plussing a script is all about.

Still one might ask, "Is there a point to this?" It's a fair question. After all the Clint and Mac panel really was incidental to the story. Its basic idea could have been got across in a simpler way. Is Toth just showing off? Comics as a medium are admittedly less involving than movies. People tend to read them quickly without scrutinizing each panel. However I believe that, just as happens in movies, thoughtful plussing subliminally adds to a reader's experience of the story, allowing him or her to take away from it more than was originally there.