The Four Color Media Monitor

Rob Salkowitz at Forbes says there's scholars and readers taking looks anew at the romance genre:

The romance comics genre was founded by comics icon Jack Kirby, better known for Captain America and basically the entire Marvel universe, with his then-partner Joe Simon. Simon & Kirby had an unerring sense for what fans wanted from the medium and believed there was an untapped market among women who liked “true confession” and pulpy love stories. They were right. The first issue of Young Romance comics in 1947 sold so well that it inspired a host of imitators almost overnight, turning romance comics into a multimillion-dollar industry.

“In the 1940s and 50s, women of all ages read romance comics,” says Sydney Heifler, a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University and part of a new wave of scholars exploring the connections between comics, American culture and gender. “There was a strong moral code in those comics, but you had women who tested behavior and limits. After the mid-50s censorship scare, romance comics became a lot less interesting and more sanitized. Then in the late 60s, you had all these hilarious examples of the middle aged men who wrote them trying to keep up with women’s lib.”

Be that as it may, it's kind of surprising potential liberals would sound like they disapprove of a form of feminism, considering how they certainly used to go out of their way to uphold it...until the transsexuality cult apparently was considered far more worthy in their POV, and feminism expendable. One might also consider how the "young adult" genre also makes a big deal out of LGBT themes, and in the past decade, was plagued by alarming amounts of PC storytelling in any case, comics included, to the point where you could almost wonder what the whole point was of writing books to start with.

Now, how did romance comics slowly make a comeback years later?

One creator who saw potential in the genre was John Lustig, who began a strip called “Last Kiss” in 1996 that added contemporary captions and dialogue to vintage romance comics panels, often giving the female characters more agency – and libido – than the originals ever contemplated. “There’s some lovely artwork in those old strips, and they are the only genre that really focused on women, so I could get into what the women are really thinking,” he says. “Those images became such a trope, because they are so dramatic but in this bland, safe way. I’m playing against that image in a lot of ways.”

Clearly the concept has appeal, as Lustig has maintained Last Kiss in digital format, merchandise, and occasionally in print for nearly 30 years.

Fast forward to today, where a generation of creators raised on well-crafted josei (manga for adult women) and more sophisticated romance and romance-adjacent prose fiction have reinvented the genre for the predominantly female audience of readers who consume comics on mobile devices. The growth of platforms like Webtoon and Tapas in North America have given creators ways to connect directly to readers hungry for romance-oriented work compared to traditional publishers aiming for the more male-dominated superhero and action genres.

On that note, they may want to consider that, whatever one thinks of superhero themes, Marvel/DC ostensibly tried to write their comics as geared for women in the past decade, and in the end, had no success, because they were draining the action themes for the sake of poorly written drama that didn't appeal to anybody. And even that was sabotaged by alarming amounts of wokeness. If they were serious, they would've produced self-contained romance tales not connected to their superhero universes proper, and they wouldn't have limited themselves to the woke directions they took. Even earlier, one of the worst examples of Marvel's phony attempts at rebroadening focuses was a miniseries titled Trouble, which dealt with teen pregnancy, written by Mark Millar, and what rubbed people the wrong was that the story implied Peter Parker's family were the protagonists, hinting this was more an effort to produce cheap sensationalism. It was overseen by none other than Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas, and wasn't successful, for good reason. One of the saddest results of the miniseries was that Terry and Rachel Dodson's artwork was wasted on this botch. It goes without saying that, if the story wasn't stand-alone, that pretty much sunk it.

It's good that in the years since, there have been certain efforts made at producing new romance comics, and I recall Top Cow/Image did at least a few in the past decade, and if USA/Canadian creators wanted to, I'm sure they could even develop dramas about food, sports and fishing like the Japanese have, and even comics within comics, recalling there's anime productions where manga is referenced in the screenplays, which I see as making for an amusing in-joke. The simple point is that, if any creators wanted to, they could do much of this stuff without tampering with established corporate-owned franchises, and turn out crowd-pleasers for real. That's what has to be the way going forward. I wouldn't recommend buying comics like these from creators who were involved in destroying what made Marvel/DC work years ago, though, if only because, if they haven't apologized for playing a part in destroying Kirby/Lee's best items, then there's little point rewarding them when they ostensibly produce their own work. Only those who develop their own stories without participating in destructive directions are worth buying from, IMO. Come to think of it, the creators who're more worth buying romance and drama comics from are also those who don't take the kind of paths Garth Ennis has over the years, and unlike him, at least show some respect for adventure and sci-fi fandom's validity. That way, some improvement might one day be achieved.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, good artists, good writers, history, manga and anime, marvel comics, Spider-Man, technology, women of marvel