She Got Her Man, But Could She Keep Him? Love and Marriage in American Romance Comics, 1947–1954

Abstract

In 1947, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby published what is widely considered to be first romance comic. It was first issue of title called Young Romance, and it bore an orange banner proclaiming that it was Designed for more adult readers of comics! Below, an equally large block of text announced, All true love stories! Inside were five short narratives featuring romantic misadventures of naive high school students, starry-eyed factory worker, and sophisticated young nurse. With this, Simon and Kirby, best known to us today as creators of iconic Captain America, set formal and narrative conventions of romance comics.According to Simon, Young Romance was essentially a comic book version of popular True Story Magazine, with youthful, emotional, yet wholesome stories supposedly told in first person by love-smitten teenagers. Visually, magazine stories seemed natural conversion for comic (Simon and Simon 122). The smashing success of True Story, which had been around since 1919 and was known to sell two million copies per issue, may also have been factor (Marchand 54). After all, in his autobiography The Comic Book Makers, Simon was frank about his financial needs in wake of World War II. As allure of patriotic superheroes faded and true-crime comics began to attract unwelcome scrutiny for allegedly glamorizing crime and fostering juvenile delinquency, work in comic book field was sporadic - at least until romance comic boom (Duncan and Smith 36-37; Simon and Simon 122).Simon and Kirby's innovation paid off handsomely: like True Story, Young Romance was hit. Imitators piled in: within two years, over one hundred and twenty copycat titles glutted market, representing between twenty and twentyfive percent of total comic book sales (Nolan 44). The vast majority of these adhered to Simon and Kirby's first-person confessional formula, and like Young Romance, titles such as New Romances, Popular Romance, Thrilling Romances, Teen-Age Romances, Teen-Age Temptations, and Teen-Age Diary Secrets delivered several stories per issue that focused on romantic adventures of attractive but rather interchangeable young people. Unlike multi-issue sagas and recurring characters familiar to readers of superhero comics, or even serial newspaper strips that featured romantic themes (such as Brenda Starr or Mary Worth), romance comic books were anthologies: once narrator had finished recounting dramatic incident at heart of her story, she rarely made second appearance. The characters were not themselves memorable; they were essentially avatars of white, middle-class culture that assumed a dominant, almost hegemonic position in American society following World War II (Bailey 12).The majority of characters in romance comics reflected particular demographic that Young Romance and its followers hoped to attract: girls and young women who had outgrown humor-oriented teen highjinks of Archie and his ilk. Accordingly, romance comics featured high-school students, college coeds, secretaries, nurses, shop-girls, young wives, even some young mothers. In aftermath of World War Two II, rapid social changes made it entirely possible for girl to find herself fulfilling all of these roles within very short span of time. As historian Jessica Weiss put it, the timing of major transitions to adulthood collapsed as young people threw over accepted ordering of milestones to maturity, and couples rushed through major milestones: high school graduation, military enlistment or discharge, quickly followed by marriage, parenthood, and often, more schooling (21). Romance comics dealt with every one of hectic transitions that took place in lives of young women and addressed uncertainty that accompanied their rapidly shifting roles from daughter to spouse, student and worker to homemaker, carefree girl to responsible woman. …