The Romance Titles For Those Who Don't Collect Romance
Michelle Nolan
What’s the ideal company for collectors who don’t collect romance comics? It isn’t my favorite romance publisher, but many fans of mainstream genres love this company.
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Call it Prize. Call it Crestwood. Call it Feature Publications.
The titles of special interest are Young Romance, the first real romance comic, and Young Love, a sister publication. We’ll catch up with a few others, too.
Any collector who values iconic issues should consider acquiring either Young Romance #1 (Sept.-Oct. 1947) or the reprint done by DC a few years ago (DC bought the rights to Prize’s original two love titles in 1963).
“Designed for the more ADULT readers of COMICS,” read the strip below the logo of Young Romance #1. And so it was, making this title of more than passing interest to anyone interested in unusual genre comics.
Though teen humor titles are lumped in with love by some collectors and dealers, they’re really different genres. Young Romance, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby — of all people! — is certainly the first true romance comic. Right from the first story — “I Was a Pick-Up!” — readers knew this comic book would be different. Simon and Kirby turned in a girl’s love for a gangster who wasn’t really a gangster. This was followed by “The Farmer’s Wife,” “Misguided Heart” by S&K, “The Plight of the Suspicious Bridegroom,” and “Summer Song.”
I’m told this issue is especially hard to find — and that $40 for a “good” copy, as per Price Guide value, is an absolute steal — but #’s 2, 3, and 4 are tough to find, too. At the time, nobody else had begun publishing romance comics and Young Romance had the field all to itself for the first year. These are all 52-page gems, highly recommended as great period pieces. It’s interesting to note that the ADULT recommendation disappears on #4 and never returns!
Young Romance #2 leads off with “Boy Crazy,” a nice Simon and Kirby piece, but the real gem is a story illustrated by the underrated Bill Dram entitled “My Broken Heart Was Page-One News,” about a reporter-photographer team who didn’t know they were in love. The twist here is that the photographer is the woman — and women were almost never portrayed as anything but sob-sisters and society reporters in the 1940s.
Issue #2 also offers “ Her Tragic Love,” a bizarre story about a man on death row finding out he’s been declared innocent, only to learn that his girl has committed suicide, thinking he had died in the electric chair. Definitely downbeat — but interesting — especially with “the other woman” devoting herself to salvaging the spirit of the not-guilty guy.
Simon and Kirby, in something right out of the Newsboy Legion’s Suicide Slum in DC Comics of the previous few years, presented “Marriage Contract,” the story of a slum girl in #3 (Jan-Feb. 1948). “... I feel my true story should be told in the hopes that it will help other girls overcome the medieval (sic) marriage customs which still linger in our modern civilization…” The spelling may have been faulty, but the Simon and Kirby story and art is a pip on this 13-page epic.
And so it went for a long time in Young Romance, especially the 52-page issues of the 1947-51 period. There were great Simon and Kirby stories in almost every issue, such as the roller derby tale in #31 (March 1951); “Gang Sweetheart!” in #23 (July 1950) and “Hot Rod Crowd!” in #28 (Dec. 1950). Even romance comic haters love the cover of #22 (June 1950), with its lead story entitled “The Savage In Her!” in the cover and “The Savage in Me!” on the splash page.
Even the Comics Code Authority couldn’t entirely tame the imagination of Simon and Kirby, who appeared with Prize issues on and off for more than a decade. Young Romance #80 (Jan. 1956) is billed as “Produced by Simon & Kirby,” and it still had their stamp despite the lack of gangsters and gun molls.
If you really want a collecting challenge, try finding a copy of Young Romance from June-July 1963 (Vol. 16 #4). This one had no number on the cover or in the indicia, but it’s #124. DC picked up the title without missing a beat and correctly listed it as #125. But while the DC issues aren’t scarce, the last few Prize issues can be a mighty tough task.
A run of a few dozen issues of Young Romance from #1-124 will cover just about every possible love theme anyone could imagine. They’re great Americana!
Young Love #1 and Young Brides were very much in the Young Romance mold, with titles in Young Love #1 (Feb-Match 1949) like “The Man I Loved Was a Woman-Hater!” and “Fickle” (both from S&K) and “The Plumber and Me!” (another Draut special). With a title like “The Plumber and Me!,” how could you resist?
Or take the Simon and Kirby masterpiece in Young Love #42 (Feb. 1953) — “Girl Hitchhiker!” (blurbed on the cover as “Hitch-Hiking Girl!”). You can guess the ending, when Our Heroine tells her love, “Dan … would you give a girl a lift!”
My recommendation is that anytime you see a Prize romance comic, give it a look-see for funkiness. You might be pleasantly surprised! Even the post-Code Prize titles — Young Romance, Young Love, Personal Love, and All for Love — are worth a look.
There was a short-lived title, Going Steady, that ran five issues in 1960 (Volume 3 # 3-5 and Volume 4 # 1) as a retitling of Personal Love. Going Steady was subtitled “The Wor1d Through Teenagers’ Eyes” and took the same title as a four-issue St. John effort in 1955.
The first issue of Going Steady (Jan-Feb. 1960) had a bizarre house ad, with blank covers of Young Romance, Young Love, and Going Steady, plus the headline “Happy Birthday to Us?” The ad copy read, “Young Romance Is Now a Teenager! It has been 13 happy years since Young Romance created the love and romance comics field. Young Romance was first! Copied by a hundred others, we think it’s still the best!” The only problem was that, as those words were written, Young Romance was 12 years old! Ironically, Young Romance didn’t become a “teenager” until the last issue of Going Steady, dated Sept-Oct. 1960!
Going Steady — the oddest of the Prize efforts — can be a terrifically tough five-issue run to find. But it’s worth the effort, for title blurbs like this in the last issue: “Whenever Chet Grover took me in his arms, I felt a delicious shock and we were ... In Orbit” As if that wasn’t enough, the cover has a female teenager with the (presumably wax) heads of boys mounted in pink hearts on her wall! The title hook: “New Teen Decorating Ideas.” Indeed!
