Abstract
ABSTRACT This article aims to demonstrate that throughout the 1950s, popular teenage romance comics reflected dominant discourses concerning the teenage girl, her sexuality and mental health, and her relationship with her father in the immediate post-war era. A range of publishers contributed multiple comic book lines to the teenage romance comic subgenre. Due to their popularity and saturation of the consumer market, these comics serve as a valuable index as to how teen girls were educated in ideas concerning sexuality, psychological wellbeing, and their relationships with their fathers through mass media. Analysis focuses exclusively on those teenage romance comics published during the 1950s, since it was during this decade that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists enjoyed a general prestige and recognition by popular media and its consumers. These comics featured stories of teenage girls who, according to post-war society’s strictures, went sexually and morally astray, with detrimental effects to their mental stability. Positioned as their gatekeepers in the stories, fathers were responsible for teen girls’ sexual development and mental wellbeing. It is in the absence of fatherly love that girls became mentally unhinged and delinquent, especially in the areas of love and romance.
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