If 20th Century narrative taught us anything, it’s that people’s respectable facades are lies constructed to hide a bitter core of resentment, malice and disquieting interests. And hey, I’m no diff– I got my own weird kicks, and the one which truly disquiets is my fascination with a certain vintage of Romance Comics. Specifically, I’m interested in the slow bleed of counterculture visuals into a genre that remained, from its beginnings in the 1940s to its dismal death in the late 70s/early 80s, a forum for repressive middle class values. The contrast grew extreme in the late 60s/early 70s, with hippie chicks at swinger pads learning, miraculously, the virtue of holding out and not getting a bad reputation.

There’s a newish book on Romance Comics called Love on the Racks, authored by Michelle Nolan. We encountered Michelle at last year’s San Diego Comic Con, where I bought the book from her, and a nicer person you could not meet– the book is great, too, a thorough overview of a wildly ignored genre which will never, ever have a critical or popular revival. (Arguments about yaoi put to the side.) Worth the buy.

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Yesterday, I checked my mail box, and, lo, discovered that my supplier/patron e.j. bought me a copy of a comic I’ve wanted for a goodly long while– Heart Throbs #92. The reason should be obvious, once you scope the glorious cover:

Published in ’64, this cover and its attendant story, anticipate the influx of youth counterculture into the genre– the closest thing would be a year later (#101), when very mop-toppy versions of the Beatles started appearing. The Mod, or the American conception thereof, being a guy who dressed like the Beatles, then became a semi-reoccurring figure in the genre. But The Mod, and the Beatles themselves, were in many ways tailor-made (pardon the pun) for the Romance Comic– they were wooden men in suits, and thus not far from the typical romantic lead. By 1969, youth culture had gone through such changes that the women in Romance Comics were decked out in post-Mary Quant fantasy clothing and the men, well, it depends on the comic in question, but there were plenty longhairs in fur vests waiting to steal a girl’s heart.

The cover story of Heart Throbs #92, “The Nights That Never Ended,” is a very typical tale of love gained, lost and regained that lightly uses an unnamed Greenwich Village as the backdrop for its denouement. Given the year of publication, 1964, I imagine this was an attempt to stay au courant with the interests of the target audience of young, middle class girls. HT #92 was published roughly at the height of the Folk Revival, that strangest of all pop music manifestations. For a brief moment, a band like Peter, Paul and Mary could top the American Charts. The story serves as a fine example of how little the genre changed with time– the inclusion of the Village is a meaningless nod to the assumed taste of audience. This reunion could take place anywhere in the world, even in outer space.

Romance Comics proved exceptional at adopting visual motifs and subsuming them to the core function of value reinforcement. This, by the way, is a microcosm of the fate of so-called underground art within capitalism– your aesthetic is sure to be co-opted, your meaning and intent are sure to be discarded. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t something worthwhile in the comics for what they were– after all, they produced this panel:

I love the formal device of this story– every panel of heightened emotion is a close-up with no background detail, just a solid block of red. It hits like the beat of a drum. Here’s the full thing:

I also scanned the splash pages of HT #92′s other two stories– unlike the cover story, I find both pages disturbing. Was lingerie what girls kept in their hope chests? I thought it was Tupperware!