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: