"Agonizing Love: The Golden Era Of Romance Comics"
Written and edited by Michael Barson
Various Artists
(Harper Collins, 2011)
I enjoyed this book a lot but it took me a while to pick it up because the other Amazon reviews were so vague about the book and its contents. I had assumed it was more of a pop-culture history book, but it's mostly a compilation of reprints of howlingly funny early 1950's romance comics, from when the genre had just taken off. The book itself is larger than I'd expected, slightly taller than a standard American newsstand magazine, though it's not too thick or too heavy and comes as a fairly elegant paperback edition, with lots of bright colors and a modest amount of introductory text from the editor.
Obviously, Michael Barson loves this stuff, and revels in the over-the-top, now-unbelievable cosmic levels of sexism inherent in the genre, and I enjoyed the tone of his commentaries. Some folks have faulted the book for poor layout, mostly because the artwork is presented as facsimiles of the original blurry, yellow-paged newsprint comic books. A lot of modern readers prefer reprints like the Marvel Masterworks and DC Archive series (which I enjoy as well) and expect that going forward all comic book reprints should have the same level of digital enhancement and color correction. However, I think that for a project like this, particularly with such resoundingly cheesy genre comics, that having something that approximates the old newsprint editions is entirely appropriate -- it underscores the antiquity of this particular genre and constantly reminds us that this is Stuff From Another Era. I particularly am in favor of *not* cleaning up the line art and color registration errors that were present in the original comics: romance comics were a pulp genre and seeing how cheaply and hastily-produced they were is part of understanding their cultural context. I think Barson did a great job here.
Unfortunately the stories come disproportionately from now-defunct second- and third-tier publishers, with some cooperation from Marvel Comics, which apparently snapped up some of those companies' back stock when they folded. There isn't, however, much from the arguably superior Marvel/Atlas catalog, with featured much better artwork from folks such as Vince Colletta, and also doesn't dip into the late '50s and early '60s when Atlas romance was at its peak. There are a couple of nice stories featuring artwork by Bill Everett, but mostly these short melodramas are about the content, not the visual aesthetics. And also nothing from DC or Archie Comics. Sorry.
But omigod, the content is unbelievable! Romance comics lend themselves to picking out a panel at a time, for crazy-sexist dialogue, and Barson does this at the start of each thematically-arranged chapter (one about getting married, one about struggling against domineering mothers-in-law, etc.) These stories, even though they are from Brand X publishers, are well selected and offer an amazing reservoir of cultural psycho-sexual horror stories, incredibly funny and truly disturbing at the same time. There are a lot of doozies to choose from here, but I think my favorite is "Was I A Wicked Wife?" circa 1950, in which the humorless husband sternly reprimands his too-cheerful newlywed wife, "Ellen, little Ellen... You don't know yet that all of life isn't fun! You're like a sheltered child, who has never known the harshness of the world! Marriage is not a game, my darling... Sometimes it is a grim and serious business!" Take that, Don Draper! But in the end, he's proven right: he winds up having an accident and breaking his back because she didn't do her housework right.
If you're a fan of the romance comic genre, don't hesitate to pick this up. It should probably be on the shelves of all women's studies programs at any university worth its salt. The postwar era was never better dissected than in these crude, girly-girl classics. (By the way, I am eagerly awaiting the day that Marvel publishes high-quality editions of some of their late-'50s Atlas stuff as well: skip the talky early stuff and go for the more stylish work of 1955-60. Pretty please??) (DJ Joe Sixpack, ReadThatAgain book reviews)
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