A Very Brief History of Romance Comics

Romance comics were one of five major genres of adult comics which boomed after World War II. The so-called golden-age of comics began in 1935 and ended at about the time of the self-imposed Comics Code of 1954. The main period of interest to this archive is the third phase of the golden era, from 1948 to 1954. During this period comic readership was at its height, and adults, both men and women, were a major piece of the market. These years saw comic sales approach 60 million issues per month, and a 1950 government-sponsored study of an Ohio town revealed that 54 percent of all comic readers were over 20-years old, and that the average reader bought about 11 comics per month.

For the first and last time, adult women were major consumers of comics. And although the genre is largely dismissed by comics aficionados today, it was created by two of the most revered artists and writers of the time: Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who kicked off Young Romance in 1947. Kirby and Simon had created Captain America in the early '40s, and Kirby is responsible for many famous superheroes, including Mighty Thor, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. Success followed the pair into romance comics, and by 1949 there were 120 romantic titles on the market, most of which were intended for an adult audience. (In fact, comics with more explicit themes, which were very common before the code, often carried bright orange labels which read For the more ADULT Reader of Comics.) By 1950, there were 148 different titles, and by the mid-fifties pretty much every comics publisher was churning out romance comics.

The comics were written and drawn almost exclusively by men, and they tended to reinforce notions that a woman's primary goal in life was to marry. True to their time, they perpetuated an ideal of hetero-monagamy, which is now somewhat outdated. However, these stories very frequently dealt with complex, mature issues. Their protagonists were almost always working women, and their problems were often quite realistic. Workplace power struggles between the sexes, out-of-wedlock children, marital infidelity, and divorce were tackled between stories of pure escapist fantasy. In this manner, romance comics responded to needs that were historically significant: young, working women saw representations of themselves as intelligent, modern people‹people who valued love and dreamt of romance, but who also negotiated life in the real world. Furthermore, men were reading these stories, and seeing these representations, too, if the ads in the comics are any indication. At least half the advertisements in the romance comics in this collection are clearly aimed at boys and/or men.

Changing mores, television, the Comics Code, and the decline of comics in general eventually combined to kill off the adult genres. D.C. Comics carried a few romance titles into the late '70s, but by then the heyday of the romance comic had long passed.