Comic Media Romances

Repulsive Romance
I've been on a romance comic spree, prowling those wonderful archive sites, Digital Comics Museum and Comic Book Plus, for pre-Code heart throbs. Most 50s romance comics were pretty dreary, enlivened occasionally by a nice art job (Matt Baker hit his stride here). But I certainly found a couple of surprises.

Simon and Kirby are credited with creating the romance comic, inspired by the "confession" magazines which had been around since the twenties. I've no expertise in confession mags, but I've seen enough of them to know that they lured their audience with promises of **SEX**, which the stories delivered in roundabout ways constrained by anti-smut laws. The S and K romance stories weren't that bad. They tended to be more complex and character-driven than later more formulaic tales. Though melodramatic, they were seldom lurid. It was left to copy-cat publishers to go for the gonads with covers promising sex-charged stories. Saint John was great at this; Matt Baker's beautiful covers overflowed with suggestions of cheap pickups, premarital sex, and wild, wild women.

With a few notable exceptions the stories inside seldom delivered the goods. St. John almost always cheated its way out of provocative situations. The girl tells her boyfriend the guy living in her apartment is a jobless acquaintance crashing on the couch--and he really is a jobless acquaintance crashing on her couch (though he turns out to be a worthless freeloader). Recently I ran across a comic that broke the rules. Comic Media's Dear Lonely Hearts offered relatively tame covers, but the stories inside were something else again.

Comic Media was a small publisher remembered today for particularly grisly horror stories and for Pete Morisi's Johnny Dynamite. In the early 1950s they published in a variety of genres, including romance. Comic Media's 1951 title, Dear Lonely Heart (singular) lasted 8 issues and was standard fare. Dear Lonely Hearts (plural) appeared in 1953 and also ran 8 issues. But it was an altogether different kettle of fish. In the four issues currently available you'll find a few "typical" romance stories. The rest combine those staples of 1950s culture, sex and violence against women, to deliver some downright repellent "romances." These stories, narrated by a photostat of the head of a woman whose eyes don't line up, purport to represent a marriage counsellor's typical cases.

Take for example issue 6.

"Pin-Up Girl": Terry is trying to break into modelling, though her fiance doesn't like "everybody staring at you in that bikini thing." She receives a message from the head of a big agency asking to meet at her apartment to discuss business. The agent is rude and aggressive. He insists she change into a bathing suit he's  brought along. Then he asks for more.

When he doesn't get it the agent goes ballistic. It looks like attempted rape. Actually it's attempted murder. As the agent strangles Terry he fantasizes about launching his own career as a serial killer.

Luckily Terry's suspicious fiance shows up with the cops and the real head of the modelling agency. The would-be lady killer was a loony office boy. As the cops drag the fake agent away the real one offers Terry a shot at her modelling career. I don't know if right after the girl was nearly murdered is the best time to talk business, but anyway...strangely for a romance comic, the agent suggests to her fiance that Terry could have both her career and her marriage. This doesn't prevent husband-to-be from rolling out the me-Tarzan line in the final panel.

In "Nightmare Lover": Vicki and Bob are engaged but Bob is getting over a long illness.He's sent to live alone in a remote cabin while he recuperates. (This sounds to me like odd medical practice, but what the heck, this isn't a doctor comic.) Bob writes her every day. Finally Vicki receives a letter asking her to come meet him. Overjoyed, she goes to the cabin. But something's wrong. Bob doesn't give off the old vibe. What's more, he's horny and wants it now. When he insists a bit too hard Vicki figures it out.

That's right: another sex-mad murderer! He's really Dexter Denning, "the finest though unrecognized actor in the world," and he's chucked the real Bob over a cliff. Unlike the fake agent, Denning wants his sex before he gets on with the murdering.

Luckily for Vicki, Bob is alive. He only fell "part way down" the cliff. Vicki's struggling gives Bob time to climb back up and foil Denning's plans. Denning grabs an axe, intending to kill Bob for real. Just then the cops burst in. Denning makes a wild throw with the axe and an odd thing happens:

Gotta watch out for those sharp-bladed rubber axes. The cops haul Denning back to the asylum from which he escaped (beats going to the morgue), remarking that "He ain't a fit sight for a young lady." I guess older ladies are more accustomed to killers with cloven heads. Bob and Vicki end up in a grateful clinch.

Another story in the same vein is "Tea With Terror" from issue 5. Terry (is this the future model from #6?)  takes in a handsome homeless guy and falls for him. Unfortunately he turns out to be a serial rapist/murderer whom the police have been chasing. Luckily the kind cop who took a fancy to her enters just as the killer is about to add Terry to his list.

That issue also offered "Mountain Love," in which a stylish young woman moves to the country to teach school. Her manner of dress scandalizes the gossips and arouses her rural beau. A local Good Guy doctor saves her honor by besting the boyfriend in a fistfight.

By the seventh issue the raping and murdering had waned and the stories were tamer. There were still a few notable oddities, as we'll see in the next post. To close the present tour I offer a condensation of the single weirdest romance story I've ever read: "Price of Passion" from Dear Lonely Hearts #2.

Orphaned at 14, Tess lived on the streets and ended up in the Home for Wayward Girls. She's released into the custody of a rural family consisting of Ma and her two grown sons. Ma, an abusive slave driver, wastes no time in telling Tess where she stands.

Son Luke is a Good Guy who falls in love with Tess. His brother Cole is a glowering brute who's always eyeing the girl from afar. Though she doesn't particularly love Luke, Tess marries him. He promises to raise the town's opinion of her. This makes Cole even more sullen and he stalks Tess constantly. One day in the barn Cole forces himself on her--and Tess loves it.

Only the fact they're both fully dressed suggests they didn't Do It in the hay, but it doesn't matter to Luke, who discovers them and flies into a rage. Whereupon...

Now dig this ending and tell me this isn't one weird romance.

To be honest, to me these things are like a train wreck. The stories are repugnant yet they fascinate me. Who was their intended audience? Can you really see lovesick girls reading this stuff? Did the editor imagine these stories taught some bizarre "moral" message? I realize the cliche of the hero saving the maiden from "the fate worse than death" has been around for ages, but in a romance comic? Strange are the ways of cheap literature.

San Diego ComicCon 2010--2

Girls! Guns! G-Strings!
As I mentioned in my last post, one's skull would have to be numb indeed to miss the central theme informing a majority of ComicCon's displays: sexualized violence.

Years ago, in the days when panting fanboys were creating the concept of "good girl art," their quest was for scantier clothing and poky nipples. As the Market's inexorable drive for profit eroded the media's creaky self-regulatory machinery, we got what we wanted and then some: acres of flesh, scandalous action poses, and button-popping bosoms big enough to float the Titanic. Even then the groundwork was being laid for the next evolutionary phase. The mainstreaming of bondage fetishism and the rise of slasher movies helped cement the new role of newly-naked comic book women as sexy torture victims.

Of course the image of the beautiful, terrorized victim is as old as our patriarchal society. What's different today is its intensity and pervasiveness. At first one might imagine that the more recent wave of images of sexy women as perpetrators of violence emerged to balance out the powerlessness of the earlier sexy victims. Really it's just a variation on the same theme. They may pack guns the size of Volkswagens, but these busty amazons wear the same wire micro-bikinis, strike the same sweaty wide-legged poses, and twist their mouths in the same screams of pain. They still get raped, beaten, shot and flayed in page after lovingly-rendered page. The main difference is that after the abuse they carve their abuser's entrails out.

I can't buy the idea that this is all okay. The official line, supported both by leftist free speech advocates and rightist believers in unregulated markets, is that this fetishized misogyny is harmless. The mayhem is imaginary. People can tell fantasy from reality. Those who indulge in these fantasies achieve catharsis as well as orgasms. They would never carry their fantasies over into the real world.

My problem is this. Teachers have known for years that repetition and immersion change attitudes as well as increase knowledge. Propogandists have known for generations that endlessly repeating the same lie alters a target group's beliefs. With repetition and immersion cults brainwash members into doing everything from panhandling to killing themselves. Most significantly, advertisers have over a century of proof that repetition and immersion can make consumers lay out vast amounts of money on the stupidest products for the most irrational reasons.

Yet somehow this rule doesn't apply when it comes to the linking of sex with violence against women. Men don't become more physically and emotionally aggressive toward women. They don't become more tolerant of violence in general, or more inclined to abuse in their personal relationships. It's all harmless fantasy!

If someone can explain to me how that works I'd be much obliged.

Things that happened to me

1. Blades and Guns

While I was working as director on the final season of the animated TV series Street Sharks, an odd thing happened. One day Management came in and announced that the legendary Sharks were going to be booted out of their own series and replaced by an entirely new cast of alien dinosaurs.

Like all toy-driven series, Street Sharks was owned (and run) by the toy company. Publicly both studio and manufacturer belched a lot of gas about how toy shows were independently-produced entertainment, not manufacturer-dictated commercials. Everyone inside (indeed, anyone with half a brain) knew otherwise. In this case the toy company had run the latest Street Shark numbers and determined that the finheads were at the end of their long, lucrative career. The company wanted to get busy on what they hoped would be the Next Big Thing. Plugging the dinos into Street Sharks would introduce remaining Shark viewers to the new toy line, giving the rollout an extra boost it wouldn't have were the dinos simply launched cold in their own series.

The last several Street Sharks scripts were ditched and new ones quickly written. The Sharks would meet the team of good-guy alien dinosaurs (and their bad-guy alien dinosaur antagonists), then work with them for an episode or two. After that the Sharks would disappear and the dinos--as I recall their name back then was the Dino-Vengers--would have the remaining shows all to themselves. Once the change was decided upon, there was no time to mourn the Street Sharks' passing. If anything the toy company was annoyed by the transition episodes. They'd rather have dumped the Sharks immediately and got on with it.

We needed to rush out new model sheets because we had no development time. The toy company arranged for us to see their character prototypes. Our studio brass and several of us creative types drove to toy headquarters, a shiny high-rise south of Santa Monica. In a generic conference room we met with their management and chief designers. The designers, pleasant if rather intense fanboy types, proudly displayed their maquettes. These were highly-detailed resin statuettes the same size as the finished toy. The maquettes were modeled in pieces and came with removable accessories. Eventually they'd be the basis of moulds for the actual toys. The maquettes were amazing pieces, bristling with teeth, blades, spikes, guns, and every other mayhem-producing device imaginable.

After the meeting I found myself chatting with one of the toy executives, a tall youngish man who bore an uncanny resemblance to self-improvement guru Anthony Robbins. Our conversation turned to how the studio would tone down the dinos' blades and guns to meet network guidelines limiting violence in cartoons. Clearly the exec chafed at the rules. After all, the blades and guns were the toys' selling points. Then in a moment of remarkable honesty the executive said something that really creeped me out.

“You know,” he said, “we advertise these things as being for 8-year-olds, 9-year-olds, but they're not our real audience. You gotta learn to like these things, and if you're 8 or 9 and aren't already playing with them you never will. But four- and five-year olds, they love this stuff [the blades and guns]. If we hook 'em when they're four, we've got them for years. They'll keep buying 'til they're practically teenagers. We can't say it directly, of course, but four- and five-year-olds, that's who we're really designing these things for.” I remember thinking the guy would make a great tobacco company executive.

Anyway, the Sharks went bye-bye and the Dino-Vengers took their place. The following season the dinos, now rechristened Extreme Dinosaurs, spun off into their own series. Alas, they were not the Next Big Thing. Many, many more maquettes have marched across the conference table since then. Some have hit the mark; most haven't. I wonder how many four-year-olds we hooked with our show. And whether their present-day incarnations--they'd be in their early twenties now--are training their own four-year-olds to love blades and guns.