My First Romance Comic

The other day, I read my first romance comic book. That's right.... I ramble on and on about different genre's and mediums and variety and content and decades of undervalued material, and I haven't even sampled every genre under my medium of choice.

It's because deep down I'm much less an intellectual and much more an eight year old boy still in love with super-heroes.

But I finally did it. I picked a couple and gave them a try. I was actually somewhat surprised at what I found.


In my first year of college at West Chester University, I took a couple of classes that really opened my eyes to a wider world of how to perceive literature. Of course, the classes dealt with LITERATURE... and that part was lost on me. But it toiled around in my brain until I began to understand different perspectives in criticism and different ways of looking at a particular work.

One class I took dealt with pop culture. It was a class that looked at how pop culture effected our every day lives and could be reflected in our entertainment and what we could learn about ourselves and our society. This is the class that influences this blog the most. One of the assignments I remember was to bring in advertisements from one particular magazine. We talked about discerning who the target audience was based on the advertisements and came up with some interesting observations. An indirect way of looking at the source material.

While I read Love Stories #149, published in 1973 by DC Comics, I was struck by how new it was. The stories were very 'dated' in the treatment of women and romance, the clothing styles were dated, and I was used to all that. It even featured artists that were familiar to me. But almost from the first page it was quite obvious I was not the target audience. The ads were for wigs and nails and weight control and books on how to get boys and be popular and I even found where I could send away for a book of pictures of dreamy 1970's actor, Chad Everett. Siiiigh.


Maureen McCormick was shilling a book about being popular on one page. The letters page read like a 'Dear Abby' column. And surprise of surprises... a house ad for DC super hero comics. But only DC super hero comics with female stars. I can honestly say I've never seen this house ad before and I've read comics from all over the seventies several times over. This particular ad was aimed at girls.


The experience wasn't altogether unpleasant. It was new. It wouldn't entertain me for long, but it was good to try it out.

After thinking a lot about this experience, I asked my eleven year old daughter Katie to bring me one of her One Direction magazines.

It. Was. So. Much. Worse.


Thanks,
DCD