It's just comics- part 11

continuing my informal look at ROMANCE comics


It took me a while to warm to the romances of the publisher Quality Comics, which is odd as I would now say that the better ones are among the best that ever were. You can find a large number to read at the Digital comics Museum and a timeline history of the company here. The thing that kept me cool about them was the veneer of slickness that is spread over all the stories, a barrier against my search for the thumbprints of individual artists and writers that is largely what motivates me to rake through the old stuff. I enjoy seeking out my artistic forebears and seeing how they lived and worked, and observing their movements in their striving to make a living in this cockeyed medium I have made my home. Those stories have for a long time been of more interest to me than the ones in the four-colour pages.

Diary Loves #5, May 1950

Quality launched 14 romance titles amounting to a total of 83 issues published between August 1949 and October 1950, at which point everything temporarily collapsed because of what Michelle Nolan, in her excellent Love on the Racks: a history of American Romance comics, calls the Love Glut. I don't have access to every single one of them, but I'll stick my neck out on a generalization and and say that in the 350 stories approximately that appeared therein, not a single one carried a writer or artist credit. This is odd, because the company showed credits in, for example, its Modern Comics in 1948 (to refer to one I've looked at recently), where it enjoys showing off ts range of very individualistic talents. This is even more the case a bit further back, in Police Comics #1 of 1941, in which all eleven stories have a signature, even if one or two of them are pseudonyms. However, by the time of the romance books there seems to be a policy at Quality of leaving out the signatures. (there was one artist in the seven year span of these books who signed his name, but let's ignore that anomaly for now)

I don't think an editorial entity sets out to manufacture a 'house style', but it is likely to have a picture in its head of the ideal work, which may look more or less like the best one of recent times or it might even look like one that doesn't exist yet, which would attribute to the editorial entity some artistic vision. Such an imaginary construct might consist of the best quality of each of the available talents. The idea is not new. In ancient times, Lucian imagined the perfect female statue made up of the best qualities of other known statues. The obvious problem with this is that the personalities of the various artists, their quirks and oddities and peculiar poise, the things I said I was looking for above, are carpeted over.

Before even getting to the part that involves the qualities of this or that artist, a house style can start with the simplest considerations; let's say a concept of graphic decorum that requires margins and gutters to have the manicured edges of a bowling lawn. This is Carmine Infantino, from the recently posted archive interview at the Comics Journal:

The following summer I got a job over at Quality Comics. That was the Ray, Black Condor, and that group. My job was to erase pages and white out any lines — Busy Arnold, the owner, didn’t like any little black lines sticking outside of panels. He had a fetish about it.

Quality's line-up of talent at different times included some of the top guys in the business whose work was always immediately recognisable to those interested in such things: Will Eisner, Jack Cole, Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, Paul Gustavson, and others including Bill Ward. Ward was an all-round artist who anonymously drew a lot of the action series Blackhawk when it became more than Crandall could handle:

"However, things worked out great. Reed Crandall was given (Blackhawk in) Military, changed now to Modern Comics, and I was given the Blackhawk book. Unfortunately, there was one difference for us: We were just to do penciling – inkers were to take over from there.
A few words about "inkers." I’ve always contended, perhaps unfairly, that an inker was an artist that couldn’t handle a strip on his own, that all he had to do was go over the pencil lines with a brush. I was very disappointed with the way my Blackhawks turned out. They weren’t nearly as good as the complete jobs I’d done before the war.
If it affected me, it affected Reed Crandall far more. Never again was he to create the classic Blackhawks that he did in 1941-42. His bold yet simple inking style was lost as the inkers butchered his penciling. He and I were destined to go on doing Blackhawk this way for 7 years." (from an autobiographical account)

Ward was also top-notch in the humorous style. His strip Torchy, which started appearing in Modern comics in 1946, was a very striking piece of work. These were days when comics were funny and filled with characters like Berp the Twerp and Granny Gumshoe. Torchy was a blonde who was dumb in the way of blondes back then, but who always somehow came out on top in whatever situation she found herself in. Being stylistically outre seems to have been the goal in the humorous stuff of the late '40s.

Modern Comics #63, July 1947

Torchy is elongated like a Barby doll and looks like she's going to be made of the same stiff plastic, but somehow Ward gets in little observational details that make his female figures very appealing. Torchy was to get her own comic book:

"Then disaster struck, the greatest disappointment of my career. I had finished the cover and the lead story for issue No. 1 when George Brenner phoned and told me they were taking me off Torchy! Romance comics had come on the scene at the same time and they were instantly best sellers. None of the other artists, due to the fact they had had no experience doing women, could handle it – it had to be me. They planned on a bunch of books, and I was to do the covers and lead stories. It meant lots more money for me, but I was furious!
I phoned Busy and pleaded with him that Torchy was my baby. I just wouldn’t turn her over to another artist. We ended up with a compromise. If I could find the time, he would let me do as many of the covers as I could manage, plus the same with the lead stories.

Thus, since Ward was already drawing a female character he was made the mainstay of the Quality romance comics, doing the covers and lead stories in all the books at first. This is the first page of the first story (the scan looks like it's been tweaked to bring out the colour contrasts):

Heart Throbs #1, Aug 1949

As I said in an earlier post, they got the idea of doing romance comics from the romance pulps, but it took a while to figure out what a romance story was supposed to look like when it was in a comic, and even who the readers were supposed to be. By the time of this later example, also by Ward, you can see that they were getting a clearer idea about it.

Campus Loves #2, Feb 1950

Within a couple of years Ward, ironically, was being used as an inker on the romances, bringing the work of diparate pencillers closer together. At least that seems to be the case. Nobody seems to know for sure. The panel at the top of this post is from a story posited to be inked by Ward over Sid Greene (?) pencils. Question marks appear after all such guesses. A house style has been successfully created. You can figure out how it happens. The editor could combine his best penciller, penciller A1 with inker A1, but the company, having put itself in the position of having to deliver an implausibly large number of comic books, reasons that it would be something of a waste to have the best people going over the top of each other. It would make more sense to have Penciller A1 combined with Inker A2, and inker A1 working over penciller A2. Inker A2, after working over the excellent pencils of penciller A1 for six months, it's now felt that he may have picked up enough of A1 's stylistic tricks to reproduce them hismself. Let's move inker A2 up to pencilling, and have inker B3 go over him. After a couple of years of this kind of thinking, you can imagine that all the personal qualities would have been evened out. But what if your people are so good that even inker B3 would be top at any other company? Imagine the overall level of slickness that could be achieved. This is Quality Comics at its organisational peak at the end of 1950.

If I had to describe the Quality style at that time, I would say that its hallmarks are, to begin with, the lettering, mechanical Leroy lettering for a short time, with the nice touch of lower case in the captions (I mentioned this earlier in connection with a different publisher. I suspect it may have started at Quality);

Hollywood Secrets #5, Jul 1950

The colouring is distinctive too. I wonder if this is due to a particular printer used by Quality. Red often sits nicely on the page without looking gaudy, and the paper itself often appears to have a cool greyness about it. If you look again at the panel at top, there are two shades of red with a cool green between them, which strike me as a tasteful Quality effect. And I see the same agreeableness in this Lady Luck page form 1945, from a handful of Klaus Nordling stories posted by Ger Apeldoorn last week.

There was also a fetish among the Quality artists for elaborately rendered hair, which you can see in the glossy blonde hair of the standing figure of Torchy in the second illo above, and in the following, for which I have notated a recurring inker named 'tidy hair inker'. (these are two particularly exaggerated examples to make my point)

Campus Loves #4, Jun 1950

Hollywood Secrets #6, Sept 1950

In fact, when they draw for other publishers they take the hair with them, it seems. This is Fred Guardineer drawing for Eastern Color. His credits at Quality are usually given as ending in 1944, but i wonder if he's not 'tidy hair inker', assigned at one time or another to cover just about every penciller in the stable during 1949/50.

Movie Love #4, Aug 1950, (Eastern Color)

Romance comics are still inadequately catalogued. I can open up file after file at the Grand Comics Database and it's all just story title and then question marks for all the creative people. Some 26 artists names have been posited for half of the stories in that first year of Quality romance. After that it gets harder still. Jim Vadeboncoeur has done a lot of work recently to put some names in place and Ger Appeldoorn is to be applauded for identifying a number of stories attributable to a young Gene Colan. There's one 1953 story for which three experts have each attributed a different penciller, which in my experience usually indicates a new artist swiping figures from a number of places to construct his story.
Next up I'll examine a single story that I think is rather good.

it's just comics- part 10

In Part 4 I wrote about the swift rise of the romance comics genre: "By the middle of 1949 things were building to a glut," with the peak happening around Dec '49/Jan '50. That makes it sound like they were throwing every kind of junk into the market, but in fact one of the most beautiful looking comic books I have ever seen came out at the peak of this glut.

It was published by St John (last seen here in Part 6), and titled Adventures in Romance. It was cover dated Nov 1949. A second issue with the title changed to Spectacular Adventures had the date Feb 1950 and then that was the end of it. The comic was deliberately different, beginning with its slightly larger format (I've only seen it online, so i'm quoting the historical record on that account) and promising on its contents page: "Thrilling action, good-humored comedy, and heart-warming romance, are combined for the first time in this brand new, exciting magazine." the cover and lead story were drawn by Warren King, an artist who I think swiftly 'moved up' to doing paperback book covers

The knockout feature in this comic is that, as well as having art spilling out into the margins of the pages, each of the stories opens with a double page spread:

Adventures in Romance #1- Nov 1949

I love the fresh, bright and healthy quality that emanates from King's artwork.


Note also that the stories are not told in the first person, which would become de rigeur in the romance books.


Of the other three stories, one is a 'western-romance', a genre hybrid that had a short popularity, another is a light comedy and a third has a 17th century historical setting. When the smoke cleared after the glut, this kind of variation became rare. Of these other three stories, two 8-pagers were drawn by Leonard Starr, last seen in this series of posts doing assignments for Simon and Kirby earlier in 1949. In a period when most comic book stories were drawn anonymously, the artists have signed their names proudly in this book.


I'd love to see the second issue, in which Starr is in Caniff territory with a 20-page(!!) story titled China Bombshell. The other artistic contributor is Frank Bolle who I think nowadays is to be found drawing Apartment 3-G in the newspapers. The Grand Comics database gives the writing of this one to Dana Dutch. Furthermore, in a time when so many of these publishers were resorting to the formalities of Leroy mechanical lettering (if you look back over these posts you'll see it in the pages from Avon, EC and Famous Funnies. Quality were also using it), look at how smart the calligraphy is in this story. Perhaps the artist did it himself, since it is so perfectly integrated into the job as a whole. Look for example at the way the motif of the raised eyebrow in the final panel is inverted in the initial 't' of 'the end' that runs beneath the panel.


I read it and sampled the pages at The Digital Comics Museum, an online site that is a real education in old comics. I salute them! This particular book must have been scanned for a mint copy or somebody knows more about digital restoration than I do. That does not look like 62 year old newsprint. in fact, now that I look again, there are no staples showing in those spreads. Well done, whoever it was!

St John threw another gem into the bubbling glut, and again it only lasted two issues, Oct. and Dec. 1949. this was Hollywood Confessions and its appeal is that it has Joe Kubert all over it. He did the covers, and where he didn't draw some of the stories by himself, he inked over pencils by Joe Giunta and Hy Rosen. the result is a stylistically cohesive and attractive package.
That's the second issue's cover at left. (found at the Grand Comic Book Database, another invaluable source for comic book history.) The idea of a book of romances with a Hollywood angle may even have been Kubert's idea, and he may have put the whole thing together himself too. ( A little later he would be a creative force at St. John, with Tor in the world of 1,000,000 years ago and the very first 3D comic book.) On the other hand, it wasn't to be a unique idea. Quality Comics had two new comics out with Hollywood in the title over the following two months, and neither of them lasted more than six issues.

Hollywood Confessions #1 Oct 1949- art by Kubert

The above sequence is very unusual in a romance book. And the following story's pencilling by Giunta is full of unpretentious charm:

ditto- art by Giunta-Kubert

It's just comics- part 9

One of my intentions with this series of posts is to look at the other publishers of the early 1950s and see how they matched up to the vaunted EC comics. And there were a hell of a lot of publishers in the game. As already noted, not all the publishers got into ROMANCE, but there were at least 38 that did. I find myself now looking at some of the comics published by Avon.

I'm arriving at subjects by way of random connections rather than any order of importance. I arrived at this one through the clipped loose pages of a story in my files that I find attractive. It's one of a bunch of stories reprinted, in black and white, by Malibu (or a small company of that ilk) in the 1990s.

Realistic Romances #4- Feb 1952

This would have been the original cover of the issue. There tended to be an animal lustfulness about Avon's romances at this time, with people eating each other rather than gazing longingly. At least, that's the impression I'm getting from the handful of issues viewable at the Digital comics Museum. 'Realistic', to judge from some of the stories, means tales of beautiful women falling for gangsters. For example, in #16, the female protagonist of the first story ends up in court, being judged guilty, after a shoot-out at a gas station; the heroine of the second is behind bars after the FBI walk in on the perfume counterfeiting racket; and of the third she's being taken out of a sanatorium after being cured of 'reefer madness.' Years later Avon would lead the way in the modern ROMANCE genre in paperbacks when "in 1972 they put out the first single-title romance to be published as an original paperback" (according to wikipedia... this isn't the sort of thing I would otherwise know). Founded in 1941 as an early publisher of paperbacks, they published a line of comic books between 1945 and the mid-50s, but I'm thinking that, at least as far as the romances go, they weren't weren't quite in step with the rest of the field.

Here's another cover, just to underline the point.

Romantic Love-#13-Nov 1952

The art inside their romance comics often has a rather old fashioned look about it. This didn't occur to me with the story signed by Astarita above because of its World War 2 setting (though that is part of the 'deception', the girl in uniform being a Hollywood actress), some ten years earlier than the publishing date. I looked for some details on the artist at Jerry Bails' who's who of comic books. There I find that Rafael Astarita was born in 1912 and was working in comic books from the beginning (New Comics #1 Dec 35). During the early 1950s he worked mostly for Avon and St John. The dress and mannerisms of his figures suggest a man who would have been fashion-aware in the 1930s rather than the 1950s. But it goes deeper than just the recognizability of period clothes or automobile styling. In the following splash panel, also by Astarita, even the pictorial construction, and the way the eye is lead into the composition, belong to an earlier period.

Intimate Confessions-June (?) 1952

Contrast with this title panel by Alex Toth, an artist 16 years younger and very much a a 1950s guy. You'd swear it was published more than just one year later.

New Romances #17- published by Standard -Alex Toth- Aug 1953

The other artist I associate with Avon is Everett Raymond Kinstler. He was something of a virtuoso with the pen and brush , but while Kinstler was an artist of Toth's generation rather than Astarita's, the trouble with his virtuosity was that it emulated the penmanship of those other guys who owned three names, Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg, artists who made their mark in the opening decades of the twentieth century. He liked to fill his page up with as much ink as possible:

Realistic Romances #16 -June 1954

Sometimes I feel that the self-conscious inkwork has been laid over a rather commonplace comic book conception, as suggested by this face:



Before long Avon had him doing as many covers as they could get out of him for the whole line, of which the romance titles were just a small part:.

Romantic Love-July 1954

Let's get a close-up of the pen technique:



Romantic Love- #20-March 1954

While the jarringly aggressive covers of the earlier phase have gone, still Kinstler is never going for the classic iconic representation of love in these images. There's always some little detail that makes it a specific moment rather than a general expression. Nor is there a sense of narrative. I suppose that the girl in the red dress is inviting the guy in for a coffee rather than telling him never to darken her doorstep again and he's taking it like a trouper. But the pictorial syntax doesn't ask us to care, or at least not in the way it does in the panel by Astarita at the top of this post.

I tend to feel closed out by Kinstler's fussy story art, but I'm drawn to these covers. While they feel like old pulp illustrations that have been unnecessarily coloured in, they do have a muscular and unsentimental simplicity about them.

Realistic Romances- #16- June 1954

After comic books, Kinstler became a celebrated portrait painter and painted many famous Americans. Here's his Richard Nixon.



more portraits by Kinstler at The Greatest American painters gallery.

Everett Raymond Kinstler: The Artist's Journey Through Popular Culture - 1942-1962. [Hardcover] (2005)

Amusing postscript:

I.W. was a company whose thing was to reprint comics previously published by other companies, sometimes without permission reportedly. There were so many publishers out of business following the introduction of the Comics Code that they all must have had more important things to worry about. I.W. plied this trade for about five years, 1958-63 (I have one of their Spirit reprints). They put out several issues of Avon's Romance titles, and led off with a more up to date cover, see left,

(circa 1958)

It's just comics- part 8

While looking for those colour Frazetta stories in part 5, I found, right next to the first one, this story drawn by Bill Everett. It solved its narrative problem in the exact same way as the story illustrated by Frazetta in the following issue. The protagonist sees an opportunity to humiliate her rival by causing her to nearly drown, and then decides she is not really evil and has to help rescue the girl. It's getting so that as soon as I see the swimsuits I get a bad feeling.

Personal Love #24 Nov 1953 (link)

But what held my attention long enough to get through it was the thought of Bill Everett, not only moonlighting away from Marvel (probably why he didn't sign it), but doing a love story, even if it was in his element- water. It seemed so unlikely, and yet anybody making a living in comics between 1949 and 1954 could hardly avoid it, so popular was the genre. Everett was there almost at the beginning of comic books, with his Sub-Mariner, and I'm sure he'd rather have been doing that character still. But times were changing. Sub-Mariner was cancelled in 1949 and now it was all all HORROR and CRIME short stories, and of course ROMANCE.

I wondered if he had done more, and in these days every artist has his chronicler. Everett has a whole appreciation society. With regard to our present subject there's a blogger named Doc V. In two posts (one, two) he has accounted for 36 romance stories that Everett drew for Marvel (under its Timely imprint first, then Atlas). Both of these posts are exhaustive epics that scroll down for about three weeks each. And each contains all the pages of a half dozen selected stories. it's a real reading feast, and Doc V's analytical notes are good.

The thing about Everett is that he never slacks off. If he is not enjoying the job, there is no way that you could tell. He goes at every job he has ever drawn with an equal intensity. Everything gets his full attention: foreground, background, skin, clothes, bricks, mortar, leaves, grass.

Love Diary #9- Oct 1950

Love Adventures #9 Feb 1952

Once he got his head down he didn't look up till it was finished. I think this tended to make his work look quite old-fashioned by the mid-1960s. Perhaps an artist with his head down is apt to miss the look of a changing world. But that kind of application often produced results which were grotesque, which made the artist especially right for horror stories. He drew many of these for Marvel in the early '50s. There are several complete stories at comic book attic. Some of them have the obsessive detail of a Hieronymus Bosch:

Venus #17- 1951

In these romance stories that quality is useful when a brooding intensity is required, such as in this story in which a woman ensures that her wheelchair-bound sister remains a prisoner of her disability. "The anguish meter is pushed into the red zone!" yells our host, Doc V. Sometimes with these things I imagine I'm reading a parable, a metaphor for general application in psychological matters. Interestingly, this one was scripted by Carl Wessler, whom I praised highly for a crime story in part 2 of this series of posts. Every now and then in one of these things I get a feeling that a measure of real observation and understanding has gone into it, that somebody is telling me something.

Lovers #51- Sept. 1952

Sub-Mariner #35-Aug 1954
Namor, the Sub-Mariner, was revived in his own series in April 1954, and Everett happily returned to drawing his adventures. It only lasted until October 1955.

When I was about 19 I put my favourite photos of my childhood and my family and friends in an album. I put word balloons coming out of people's mouths and captions and stuck in travel tickets and bits of maps and tv personalities and other circumstantial evidence. And for the frontispiece I cut out a panel of Namor plunging down an elevator shaft, opressive with every brick and wooden plank drawn in. In my teen-age nihilism it seemed to me to encapsulate the trajectory of life. That's it at left. On the flipside of the cutting he's back to fighting a green scaly monster, but hey, I can cut a panel out and imagine it went a different way if I like. who's going to stop me?

It's just comics

For me the sea prince never got out the elevator shaft.

I don't think Everett did either.

Last year Fantagraphics published a monograph on the artist, written by Blake Bell. There's an audio file of a presentation that Blake gave about the artist in Toronto. In it he also interviews Everett's daughter, Wendy, who was 20 when Bill died at the age of 52 in 1973.

It's just comics- part 7

The Negro Romance mystery received its due coverage in the comics blogosphere a few months back, but I'll do a summary here so it can be a part of my informal survey of ROMANCE comics.

Gerald Early, noted scholar in the field of African American studies (I recognise him from his contributions to Ken Burns great documentary series on the history of Jazz) approaches PBS TV program, The History Detectives, with a curious comic book. It is coverless, but titled on the first page indicia, Negro Romance #2, August 1950, published by Fawcett comics. Growing up in the 1950s, he never saw a comic book about black people and wanted to know more about this comic that he has bought in an online auction. How did it come about? Who were the writer and artist? Were they white or black? On the program, historian Gwen Wright proceeds to track down the story of this comic book, finishing by putting names to its writer and artist. You can see the fifteen minute segment online (scan to the bottom for the complete story 'Possessed' from the comic), and if you don't want to spoil a good detective yarn, then watch that before reading on. It's 'good tv' as they say.


There are thousands of comics for which we don't know who wrote or drew them, particularly ROMANCE comics. Nobody has ever cared enough to look into it. You can see for yourself at the Grand Comic Book Database (even a Simon-Kirby title that I was talking about in part 4 has mostly 'skeleton data only'). It just needed somebody to ask about this particular one. Me, I'd have lobbed the question in among those guys who are interminably writing the history of Fawcett comics in the back pages of Alter Ego magazine (FCA- Fawcett Collectors of America they call themselves). Nowadays you can get to the heart of things overnight on the internet.

But the program must make it look like an investigation. That's their schtick. So first our investigator gets Professor Bill Foster to meet with them at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) in Manhattan. Bill's area of study is the depiction of the African American in Comics and popular culture. Here he is when I met with him at one of my favourite bars a few years back, during his visit to Australia. He happily spent the day looking in second hand Brisbane bookshops for things with very embarrassing and racially dodgy titles. I love the way that, in the world of comics, we all know each other.


In the video, Bill creates a picture of the black as depicted in comics in the 1940s and 50s and then, since they need another lead to continue with, he suggests they talk to a romance comics expert. So next they fly Jacque Nodell, romance aficionado, to the Geppi museum in Baltimore. Jacque shows us examples of the genre circa 1950, with some observations about Fawcett's particularities. She talks about the experience on her blog, where she says that they wanted the Geppi location because it has a copy of the 1955 Charlton reprint of Negro Romance. However, they decide to omit their footage they of that, perhaps because it will make Early's copy appear less of a precious artifact, a Maltese Falcon.

The final connection takes them to Shaun Clancy, one of those Fawcett Collectors of America. Clancy has interviewed the editor of this and many other Fawcett titles, Roy Ald, still living at age 90, (said interview still to be published, presumably in Alter Ego?). Ald apparently wrote the comic himself, and has credited, as the artist, one Alvin Holligsworth, a young African American aged 22 in 1950. Gerald Early is visibly moved when Gwen tells him of this. He couldn't have had a better result.


Here are a couple of pages. It's good solid craftsmanship:

Negro Romance #2- August 1950

The series only lasted three issues (cover gallery and note that #2 no longer has 'skeleton data only'). Why it did not go further is beyond my ability to speculate. So far as I can see there is nothing out of the ordinary about the stories, except of course that the characters are uncompromized depictions of black people, which is way out of the ordinary for 1950. And the art as such is not of a sort that it would be collected for itself. Except. That the artist went on to do other things of interest.

Harry Mendryk counts four stories that he drew for Simon and Kirby, though none of these were romances. MensPulpMags.com looks at some illustrations he drew for that field.


negroartist.com has a big selection of stuff, though it's all very low res. he appears to have drawn some newpaper strips though I have no information apart from the observation that by this time he had developed a considerably more sophisticated style:


He became a fine painter


And he appears to have been very outspoken:

Of one subject he painted, an African Jesus Christ, he told Ebony magazine in 1971, "I have always felt that Christ was a Black man," and said the subject represented a "philosophical symbol of any of the modern prophets who have been trying to show us the right way. To me, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are such prophets." (wikipedia)

From 1980 until retiring in 1998 Hollingsworth taught art as a professor at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. He died in 2000.






thanks to michael in comments yesterday for linking me to the video.
more romances still in my drafts folder

It's just comics- part 6

recap. I'm no expert in the history of ROMANCE comics, a genre that had its apex in the early 1950s, went into a decline after 1956 until it completely disappeared in the 1970s. I'm just looking around to see how we can piece together a picture of the best of it. In part 3 I looked at the romance comics Alex Toth drew for Standard 1952-54; in part 4 I surveyed the Simon-Kirby shop's output in the romance genre for Prize, and it was they who started it in 1947, don't forget; and then in part 5 I expressed a fondness for Frazetta's handful of romance stories for the Famous Funnies publisher 1953-54.


Long gone publisher St John's line of ROMANCE comics has a chronicler in the person of John Benson. He edited the book at left from Fantagraphics in 2003 (amazon). He argues that this line was superior to just about everybody else's line of romance comics and he is good at peopling his argument, particularly in a second book he put together in 2007. It contains interviews with all the players he could still find alive and well, which alas did not include any of the three principals.

Firstly there was Archer St. John himself (a thorough history of his company here). He appears to have had a strong idea about publishing romance comics that would avoid the absurd sentimentality that was the norm, 'pain and suffering in a glamorous setting' as his editor Irwin Stein described it. He found his leading writer in Dana Dutch. Dutch has left nothing with a signature on it, but Benson has made a diligent project of reconstructing the oeuvre of this mysterious character, sketching him from fragmentary remarks: 'he looked Irish', 'he talked like a hoodlum'.

The crux of the matter is that Dutch's heroines were not the teary eyed girl that was the staple of the genre, but a more resilient female type. For a good example of this, a blogger has posted a whole seven page story titled Without a conscience (from Teen-age Temptations #3, 1953), very nicely restored. The heroine makes some outrageous mistakes, including lying about her age in the marriage register, before rejecting both men in the piece, including the one she already married, whose heart seems to be in the right place. Not that that's any reason to marry a guy of course.

The art (sample left) is by Matt Baker, the third of the principals mentioned above. St John built the line around Baker's style and kept the artist very busy during these years. Benson has posted a checklist of all the St John romance comics, about 180 in all, with credits where identifiable or guessable, and it only takes a cursory glance to see that Baker's name is the backbone of it. Dutch and Baker together made up the house style for the St John romance books.

Matt Baker was a handsome African American who died in 1959 of a heart attack at the age of 37. He was entered into the comic book hall of fame in 2009. This is Baker and St. John in a photo taken in Hollywood:


The art in Baker's storytelling is always solid and functional; there is rarely a weakness in the composition:

Wartime Romances #4-Jan 1952

Teen-age Temptations #8- June 1954
(There's another whole story, Was he ashamed of me? at Pencil ink)

But occasionally on a cover Baker would go much further, creating a riveting image of the sort that makes fellow artists envious.

Teen-age Temptations #2 June 1953

Teen age Romances #43- May 1955

Twomorrows are publishing a monograph on the artist:

"Edited by Jim Amash and Eric Nolen-Weathington, Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour presents an impressive career cut tragically short. It features a wealth of essays, interviews with Baker's friends, family, and co-workers, and a treasure trove of his finest artwork, including several complete stories, at last giving the wonderfully talented artist his full due."

(192 pages, due Feb 2012)

more soppy romances to come.