With a collection over 42,000 comics and 40 plus years, you would think I have read every genre... everything. Well that certainly is close, but not true. One style of comic book I never read is love or romance comics. I had no reason to and since they were written for and marketed to young female readers i just stayed away.
A few months back I was a t a show and a dealer had a bunch of books for 25 cents each. Within the boxes of crap i discovered a crap ton of old romance comics with such titles as LOVE DIARY, TEEN AGE ROMANCE and my absolute favorite CAREER GIRL ROMANCES. These books are gold!
What is it about them that I love? A few things. First of all, the dialogue and the way some of these women are spoken to in the stories is uncomfortably funny. A boss calling his employee a "hot chick" or someone being told "you are smart for a beautiful lady" is certainly eye opening to see that this is how "dudes" really spoke to "chicks" but it is kinda depressing to see that women were expected to quit their jobs after they fell in love.
But the other cool thing is that the creative teams that worked on these books also worked on the war and horror comics of their particular company. I always wondered how a creator could survive working on 5 pages of FIGHTIN' ARMY, a bunch on MANY GHOSTS OF DOCTOR GRAVES and survive. I see how now! Just hand in a bunch of stuff for HAUNTED LOVE and you are all set.
As I really struggle with what to read lately, these books have given me a new and fairly inexpensive list of books that capture a moment in history and contain some better than average comic stories and art.