It's just comics- part 13

This time around, I'm analyzing the bejesus out another whole romance comic. It's a fable on a grand scale, by which I mean it isn't the complicated life made simple, a shepherd and nymph, a tortoise and hare, though one of these animals gets a passing mention. This appeared the same month as the previous, in a different one of Quality's 14 romance titles. It could well be another piece from the anonymous writer I looked at last time, because this one also sent me on a search. He may even have walked in with both scripts on the same day. If he wrote more, I haven't found them yet, but it would be nice to do so. The penciller and inker appear to be the same too, Sam Citron (?) and the 'tidy hair' inker, though he isn't given a lot of hair to work with in this one. The story is titled 'Turmoil.' Untypically, it's written in the third person.

Franklin Pierce is in the doldrums.

Heart Throbs #7 Aug 1950, lead story, 9 pages.

We get a bunch of financial-world references: "International Reaper... General Dyes... United Communications... I've got a finger in every one. I can't lose, can I, Hughes?" he laments to his personal secretary,
"I don't understand, sir. Your investments are very sensibly distributed."
Pierce gets all the classical allusions out in one rush: "I've tried to lose, but I can't! I've got the Midas touch! I'm a tin-horn Croesus turning to yellow gold against my will. I'm like the tortoise who died of shame because his shell was studded with jewels."

(I did a quick search and found: the Indian moral tale of the Sadhu and the tortoise, here compressed to a couple hundred words),

"What kind of king am I? I have all the wealth and power any king can crave. Every pleasure and comfort is mine, yet I feel alone and lonely. Friends, I have none! I cannot trust my ministers and courtiers. All are crooked and double faced. I need a friend close to me." The king summoned his advsiors and sent them to find a certain honest man...
“Most revered sage, are you Sadhu Shubhananda?" The Sadhu slightly nodded his head. The ministers told him: "Kindly, know that the king has sent us to call you to his palace. He wants you to be his friend and trustworthy companion. The King offers you all his possessions, his wealth, his comforts, his pleasures”
"Do you see that tortoise over there, so still, so quiet? This tortoise, though so quiet, and so still, is fully alive, and enjoying the sun, the water, the nights and days. It's free. Has the King any such tortoise in his palace?"
"Oh, yes!" The envoys replied, "The King has a big tortoise like this in his room. It is studded with gold, diamonds, pearls and precious gems. It’s worth a fortune."
"Hmmm! Now, tell me," asked the Sadhu: "Do you think that this tortoise over here would like to exchange places with that tortoise in the King's palace?"
There was a long silence.

After another dreary day on Wall Street, Franklin Pierce heads for home.


He confides in his friend Dr. Lister:


He tells Lister he wants to find a simpler life.

"Socrates, Plato, Aristotle," says Dr. Lister, "Great guys, all of them. They spurned material things and wove a philosophy of simplicity that lives till this day."
And then there is Donna, first appearing at the bottom of page 3 of her own story:


"He kissed her, searching desperately for a spark of compassion and sympathy, but he found only a coldly yielding body built around a core of tempered steel."



The circular panel is a '40s thing that is fast going out of style by this time, but the artist can't pass up the chance to do this little trick he's thought of, in which the embracing couple form a heart-shape. Note also how the artist gives us quite a different treatment of the appearance and body language of Donna, agressive and decisive, in comparison to Helen, dignified but uncertain, in the previous story.


Come away with me and leave all this behind, he says. Not on your Nelly Duff, she replies, or words to that effect. The millionaire gives Donna the whole kit and kaboodle. Then he parks the car at a desolate strip of beach


He arranges the telltale clothes and walks off along the beach. The moon looks like it's in the script. Identifiable with the feminine principle, it emphatically rises on a new era in the Pierce fortunes:


Donna takes over from here.


Nothing short of the ruination of everybody else will make her happy.


Her rapacious actions create tremors in the world's money markets.

"Like a stalking panther, beautiful, graceful, deadly, she took the diamond studded, continental society by storm." She's going to have her turtle and eat it too. In Paris she finds herself introduced to the one industrial magnate she hasn't been able to topple.


Edward Dubois. She gives him the sweet talk, and the glad eye, and when the sweet talking's done,


She tells him that she'll never forget the amazing stories he told her about his intriguing financial manipulations. and how she envies a man of his cunning. Then she nips down to the telegram office. "there will be an extra charge for the coded message," the clerk tells her. And the deed is done.


Dubois pulls out a pistol and is seized by the gendarmes just as he is about to murder the American financier.


The bystanders at the airport shun her. Her reputation has preceded her like a consuming fire of suspicion and disgust. When she gets home, everything is falling apart:


Even Hughes is packing his bags.


'I have everything I can ever want! I'm rich, rich, rich!'


Tormeneted by her reverie, Donna faints, and in a moment of touching theatricality, Franklin, waiting in the wings, steps from behind the curtain to catch her. She has come to realize that her love for him is more important than all the other baloney. As with the other story, there was an obligatory clinch, but again early in the piece instead of here at the resolution. I find myself moved by this guy's faith in Donna, based on nothing that is mentioned in the story, and I like the fact that this isn't spelled out.

Again with the moon. It emphatically descends as together they disappear along the beach where before he had done it alone.


'They walked away into the night, leaving behind them turmoil and confusion, knowing that somehow a pattern of new life would form from the shambles of the past.'

The story in full at the Digital Comics Museum

It's just comics- part 12

In the previous chapter of this endless disquisition on the subject of the 1950s ROMANCE comic book, by which it is my plan to alienate all my readers, I dwelt specifically on the product of the publisher Quality. This time I'm examining a single story at some length. It was published by Quality in August 1950. It caught my eye because the protagonist, Helen, is a magistrate. It's the only time I've ever seen such a thing in a romance comic.

Love Confessions #6 Aug 1950, lead story, 9 pages

Trina Robbins in A Century Of Women Cartoonists, wrote about romance comic books: "With few exceptions, the stories in these books were hackneyed and cliched, but the art was often stylish and elegant..." The problem with that statement is that it implies that other kinds of comic book are not also hackneyed and cliched. Trina probably recognises this, but her real problem is, I would guess, the one that James Romberger spells out when reviewing the Alex Toth book I wrote about here in part 3:

"the romance comics do give the artist a chance to draw a range of emotions and choreograph more intimate stagings, but they are also intended to program young girls to be subservient. In most cases, it is only that Toth drew these stories that elevates them from a justified place in the dustbin of comics history."

It makes no sense to attribute a programming 'intention' to comic books when it was already being done, neither consciously nor cynically, by the state, the church and social history. A cheap commercial artifact such as a comic book can hardly have any interest in changing the world. Its only interest is in selling enough copies to come out again next month. I'll come back to the business of changing the world before I'm finished here today.

First let's look at this notion, common to both quotations above, that you can separate everything else from the 'story.' There really are only a handful of story archetypes, or of romance story archetypes (and a handful of western stories, of horror, etc) and what you are reading is a performance of one of them. To draw a comparison, the tango is one dance, but every performance of it is unique (and both the archetype and the performance are a 'dance'). The tango may be different from a waltz, a quadrille or a four hand reel. As different as each performance of one of these may be from every other performance of it, each ends in its prescribed way, bar mishap. As an example, lest I'm not making myself clear, I see there is a new performance of Spiderman on film. You already know the story. Since the last time they performed it was only ten years ago, I cannot imagine that anybody half interested could not already know it.

So, the story is the abstract of how it started, who did what, and how it ended. Everything on the page, and things not on the page including the writer's instructions to the artist, comprise the performance. The story may already exist somewhere else, in a movie or in prose in a pulp or a slick magazine. Be that as it may, that's one performance and this is another. If you go and tell it later over the dinner table, then that's another performance again, and yours could be better than all the others.

Let's look at this one. I do not know who wrote it and probably never will. The lettering is by the Leroy mechanical process, but I'm thinking it wasn't put on the page pre-artwork in the EC manner, based on looking hard and comparing things. Judging by comparisons with other work not too distant in time and place I'm guessing the pencilling is by Sam Citron, an artist who earlier worked on Superman. Inking is by the 'tidy hair' inker mentioned in the previous instalment. The hair sits on the heads better here because the pencilling is superior. Here's a close up.


This is Wade, the District Attorney. That's him entering from the left in the splash panel spread showing a crucial scene from later in the story. Otherwise, here he is in the opening scene stating the argument. Is Helen to be a magistrate or a woman? And if she decides to be the latter, will she give him a tumble? She takes it under advisement.


Here she is in the courtroom being swayed by the boyish charms of a likely lad, a larrikin, a cheeky charlie.


She lets the guy off but then can't shake the thought that she did it for womanly reasons.


One of the set-pieces of the romance genre is the scene in the girl's bedroom in which she takes stock of the situation. In this scene she is invariably dressed in her smalls and is in a relaxed position. It's usually only one panel and it calls for a nicely observed figure study. There was a period when it was suggested that this is because comic artists are mostly male and they like drawing this sort of thing. That period was the one in which women weren't about to let anybody get away with anything.


So Helen reads a book to get her mind off the cheeky charlie. I'll come back to this panel before I'm done.


Next day, the crafty character invades her chambers. She tries to close the door on him, but he forces his way in.


There is authority in the drawings of Helen. We never for a minute think that the artist has imported a photographic reference. In fact he has probably used a number of stills of an actress from a single film in order to get such impeccable consistency. The challenge is to make it all look seamless.


Subtleties of body language make the difference between a good romance comic and a dull one. Notice the instinctive way she draws her arm across in front of her in the above. Another important set-piece is, of course, the clinch. This is not an easy thing to draw, and this artist shows skill in the way he has his figures coming at oblique angles to each other through, rather than across, the pictorial space. The crushed curls of hair are nicely observed. But storywise, this clinch represents a moment of panic, of danger, rather than emotional resolution.


Now she can't help herself and has been drawn into his web. In the romance comic, so much happens at close personal quarters that the artist must be on the lookout for a chance to get a full figure into a picture (see elsewhere, my 'feet rule'). He takes it here, getting out of the car, and has to extend the picture vertically at left to make it work (one of the reasons I deduce that the pages weren't pre-lettered).


Chuck takes Helen to a party, but it turns out to be the house party of a hoodlum.


Now she knows things have got out of control


She resolves to break off this association with Chuck, but next day, before she can tell him, he phones to say he's on his way round. He arrives with the whole gang in tow.


She realises too late that she has been used. There's been a hold-up and she's to be the alibi.


Suddenly there's a knock at the door. It's Wade and two detectives. She courageously identifies the villains, knowing they have guns trained on her.


All Hell breaks loose and Helen gets winged.


It's a nice touch that the piece doesn't end with an obligatory clinch, leaving the uncomfortable one above, and as presaged in the splash panel, the only one in the story. However, in the final panel Helen bows to male superiority, a 1950s thing that has all but died out in our time.


At this stage I'm thinking, you guys have gone to a lot of effort to make the protagonist of this story a very impressive figure for a comic book character, too much to leave her with that last bit of dialogue. I did not expect 'That rare woman, who has won acclaim in a man's world', to cave so easily. The 'performance' leads the reader of 2011 to expect a better resolution than the 'story' is obliged to deliver. You could delete everything after "I've been a fool" and the comic, in our eyes, would be much better for it. One could speculate that it was added in editorially; in virtually every book I've done with a big publisher there's been a line or two added in that I feel changed the meaning of something I wrote. Even The Fate Of The Artist has got a change I wasn't happy about after I discovered it (quite apart from the funny one I have talked about). It's what happens. But that's pointless speculation; the writer would presumably have wanted to sell another performance the following week. Let's just accept that he took the job and saw it through.

I kept returning to this comic (the complete thing is here, by the way at the Digital Comics Museum.), looking at it hard and thinking how easily it could have been a great piece of work rather than one that gave up at the final hurdle. Then I fastened on the seventh panel above, the one in which she is reading while lying down, the box of chocolates to one side. The book is a legal one, with the title is on the back cover. Perhaps the writer instructed the artist to make sure he got that title on there, and the artist had already composed his picture when he remembered the instruction so he stuck the title illogically on the back cover. 'Cady on Torts.'

I looked up Wikipedia. Daniel Cady was a Justice of The New York Supreme Court in the mid-1800s. He once served on a land dispute case with Abraham Lincoln. But he is perhaps best remembered for being the father of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an important leading figure of the early Women's Rights movement. I located her autobiography at Google Books. There follows a passage from it.

Eighty years and more: reminiscences, 1915-1897. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published by T. Fisher Unwin, 1898
(page 31)

As my father's office joined the house, I spent there much of my time, when out of school, listening to the clients stating their cases, talking with the students, and reading the laws in regard to woman. In our Scotch neighborhood many men still retained the old feudal ideas of women and property. Fathers, at their death, would will the bulk of their property to the eldest son, with the proviso that the mother was to have a home with him. hence it was not unusual for the mother, who had brought all the property into the family, to be made an unhappy dependent on the bounty of an uncongenial daughter-in-law and a dissipated son. The tears and complaints of the women who came to my father for legal advice touched my heart and early drew my attention to the injustice and cruelty of the laws. As the practice of the law was my father's business, I could not exactly understand why he could not alleviate the sufferings of these women. So, in order to enlighten me, he would take down his books and show me the inexorable statutes.

So when, from time to time, my attention was called to these odious laws, I would mark them with a pencil, and becoming more and more convinced of the necessity of taking some active measures against these unjust provisions, I resolved to seize upon the first opportunity, when alone in the office, to cut every one of them out of the books; supposing my father and his library were the beginning and end of the law. However, this mutilation of his volumes was never accomplished...

Without letting me know that he had discovered my secret, he explained to me one evening how laws were made."When you are grown up, and able to prepare a speech," said he, "you must go down to Albany and talk to the legislators; tell them all you have seen in this office- the sufferings of these Scotchwomen, robbed of their inheritance and left dependent on their unworthy sons, and, if you can persuade them to pass new laws, the old ones will be a dead letter." Thus was the future object of my life foreshadowed and my duty plainly outlined by him who was most opposed to my public career when, in due time, I entered upon it.

The writer of the comic may have just picked 'Cady' off a shelf of lawbooks. Perhaps he didn't send me to find the above, and it's all a coincidence.

Here's another. While I was writing the above, the episode of Two and Half Men, which I consider a very well written sitcom, in which Charlie is introduced to a lady judge came up as a repeat. Charlie tries to impress her but makes a mess of it. Three times he leaves a voice message for her. Then, having failed, he goes out on a bender. Arrested for being drunk and disorderly, he is brought before the judge, who happens to be Judge Linda. 'Please tell me you did not get yourself arrested just so you can see me?' she asks in disbelief. Charlie thinks about that for an instant and says 'ummm... you got me.' "Will the accused please approach the bench'. So he does, whereupon the judge says she'll call him and then gives Charlie a $500 fine. I mention this anecdote to show that the false dilemma is no longer cited. You can be both a judge and a woman. You can even find a soft spot for the accused without it being a betrayal of your profession. Dramatically speaking I mean. I can't guarantee you won't get hauled over the coals by the judicial conduct commission.

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.