Subsequent Publications
Timely/Marvel brought the second romance title to newsstands with My Romance in August 1948, and Fox Feature Syndicate released the third title, My Life, in September 1948. Fawcett Publications followed with Sweethearts (the first monthly title) in October 1948. By 1950, more than 150 romance titles were on the newsstands from Quality Comics, Avon, Lev Gleason Publications, and DC Comics. Fox Feature Syndicate published over two dozen love comics with 17 featuring "My" in the title—My Desire, My Secret, My Secret Affair, et al.
Artists working romance comics during the period included Matt Baker, Frank Frazetta, Everett Kinstler, Jay Scott Pike, John Romita, Sr., Leonard Starr, Alex Toth, and Wally Wood. Marie Severin once was given the job at Marvel of updating the clothing from old 1960s romance comic stories for publication in the 1970s.
Romance comics sold well, and affected the sales of both superhero comics and confession magazines. The publisher of True Story admitted that magazines sales were being hurt by the upstart romance comics. The August 22, 1949, issue of Time reported that love comics were "outselling all others, even the blood and thunder variety ... For pulp magazines the moral was even clearer: no matter how low their standards for fiction, the comics could find lower ones."
By 1954, parents, school teachers, clergymen, and others taking an interest in the welfare of children, believed comic books were a significant contributor to the epidemic of juvenile delinquency sweeping America. While romance comics did not bear the contempt and scrutiny heaped upon crime comics and horror comics, the genre did provoke comment from child specialist, Dr. Fredric Wertham. In his book, Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham deplored not only the "mushiness" of the romance comics, but their "social hypocrisy", "false sentiments", "cheapness", and "titillation". He claimed the genre gave female readers a false image of love and feelings of physical inferiority.
Read more about this topic: Romance Comics
Famous quotes containing the words subsequent and/or publications:
“Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“Dr. Calder [a Unitarian minister] said of Dr. [Samuel] Johnson on the publications of Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi, that he was like Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own pack.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)