One of my more recent and disquieting obsessions has been a certain vintage of Romance Comics. I’m not going to bore anyone with a history of the genre, so let’s simply state that for three decades, comics publishers put out a large number of books whose audience was girls in their tweens-and-teens. Charmingly, the writers and artists on these titles were predominantly men. It may be safely generalized that these creative fellows were at least a decade away in age from the books’ target demographic. With 21st Century minds, this sounds like trouble– whom amongst us would be daft enough to allow today’s mainstream comics professionals near our daughters and sisters?– but somehow the stories were entirely heterowholesome, and, if it was your bag, rather instructive on the virtues of making a boy hold out while you hold out for his ring.

Thankfully, my obsession has yet to turn all-inclusive and is limited to Romance Comics from about 1968ish until 1973ish. Returning to the topic of an earlier post, this period fascinates because the entire aesthetic and look of the work mutates by encompassing the greater culture’s fashion and artistic trends. Presumably due to their subject matter (stylish middle class girls), Romance Comics proved unusually susceptible to the slow design bleed of the psychedelic era. Much of this mirrors developments in superhero comics– a break-out of artistic styles and experimentation– but, ultimately, no matter how wild Peter Parker’s bell-bottoms, the Spider-Man costume never changed. Romance Comics, desperate to stay relevant, required an au courant look and fashion sense. With the dawn of Mary Quant, and the eventual trickle down from elite to everyday fashion, Romance Comics got swingin’.

(The real stars of this period were DC. One amazing Steranko story aside– available in his Visionaries trade– Marvel’s romance comics of the late 60s/early 70s were ugly. Some Charlton ones were OK, but in the end it was DC who owned the dying genre.)

The change is best demonstrated visually. Here’s are covers from 1955, 1959, 1965, and 1966, respectively:

What I take away from these covers is their similarity. Yes, hair styles and clothes change slightly, but any one of these books could have been drawn in the same month as any other.

Here’s a load of dynamite from 1968:

Contrasted against the earlier examples, this cover demonstrates that while staying true to the genre’s basic themes of chastity and questions about true love, an enormous shift has occurred in both the look and plotpoints driving narrative. In many ways, this speaks to one of the chief virtues of Silver Age comics– a cheap medium’s ability to function on a purely iconic level.

Here are several great examples:

And, of course, the creme of the crop:

Courtesy of Kyle Baker.

This cover of John Fred and his Playboy Band’s Judy in Disguise (In Glasses) is from the second printing of the LP; the titular song is pretty well done, and supposedly a parody of The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” If this commonly accepted piece of pop lore is true, then the song ranks as a massive failure. Nothing other than the mild similarity in titles would indicate its parody status. Not the lyrics, not the music.

The song interests me, but more so the album art. I’m conceptually turned on by design degeneration– the process by which subcultural and quote-edgy-unquote design motifs and elements get absorbed into the mainstream, and there’s no period in which this was more fascinating than the post-psychedelic era of 1968-1969-1970. In America, anyway, this involved biting directly from the 5 or 6 artists who had defined the Filmore/Family Dog era of posters. (Little known truth: by about ’69 most of the major artists had moved on to other things, leaving a whole new crop to produce successively less experimental posters for successively less interesting bands. For the record, I think the best artist of the period was the great Victor Moscoso.)

As I type this, I’m sitting beneath a framed version of this:

It’s dead on certain there’s no one else alive who loves this poster as much I do. From a design degeneration standpoint, along with cultural ramifications, there’s no better example of psychedelic artwork getting ripped off and abused by the Money Thresher of Mammon. Background: this is from Disney’s 1969/70 re-release of Fantasia, a naked cash-in on the druggie head-and-college crowd.

This particular image is too small to show all the details, but those orange blurs dancing down the yellow path at the left of the image are, in fact, magic mushrooms. Now in stereophonic sound! The function of the poster is a pure, commercial signal to the dope addled youth: this is what you want to see while high.

I believe this poster coincides with the period where Disney were unwilling to let young men with long hair into DisneyLand.

From Captain Marvel Adventures #43. Blackhead removal. New science, Bob helps Jim submit to Honey’s vanity. Jim gets married. Is it this easy? Thanks to Vacutex!

“Remove Ugly Blackheads Or No Cost.”

With a few exceptions, Superhero Comics worked best, and made the most sense, in the Silver Age. Although the genre was born decades earlier, it was a product of the Pulp Era of magazine publishing, and the early work, while often having interesting artists, was crippled by preexisting genre conventions. (Name a single Golden Age character not drawn by C.C. Beck or Jack Cole that’s immediately memorable for the storytelling and not later uses of the character. The Spirit doesn’t count.)

Following WWII, the superhero was dead. Other genres flourished, blah blah, and finally, the superhero was resurrected around 1956. In the interim, these other genres (specifically romance and horror comics, in my estimation) had innovated enough to get comics unmoored from literary pulp convention. When the superheroics genre returned, it functioned on a new platform supported by these previous developments. (Look at Fantastic Four #1‘s cover. That thing is a monster comic. But it isn’t.)

Featuring condensed stories with truly dynamic artwork, no profundity was expected of it, and thus none was offered. At one point, Stan Lee started calling his books “Marvel Pop Art Productions.” This is the perfect way to conceive of the era: they are art, functioning on an iconic level superior to their own meagre offerings but still basically just pop. Disposable culture, weird trash and somehow also timeless.

I realized yesterday that the Classic Albums of 1967 are forty years old. Amazing Spider-Man #50, the best “I QUIT BEING A HERO!” Spider-Man story, was published in 1967. Currently Marvel are doing their latest crap iteration on the idea; it’s a trope they drag out about once every year or so. Imagine if one out of every twelve CDs released was a Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club tribute album. Same thing.

The problem with superhero comics is that no one figured out what to do next. The genre died decades ago, spawning an industry of necrophiliac fans and creators. There’s a reason why there aren’t any new readers: no one under twenty-five has any desire for these rotting bodies. The path from 1969 is a dark one lit only by the occasional appearance of creative talents slumming it amongst the hoi polloi. I’m not dealing with it. Needless to say that, in 2007, superhero comics are broken so profoundly that there’s no way back. The 70s offered a handful of ideas, which failed, and the 80s did as well. Those too failed, except for one peculiarity: the introduction of Maturity and Grimness.

And with this in mind, kids, I recommend you return for the next installment in which we tackle J. Michael Straczynski’s recent Thor #3, possibly the most flagrant example of everything wrong with mainstream comics. Not only is it a crap unnecessary story by tired creators, it’s profoundly, profoundly offensive and just possibly racist, too!

CYA THEN.