It’s a cliche that “nobody stays dead in comics except Uncle Ben and Bucky — ooops.”
It’s also wrong. Sub-Mariner #37 killed off Lady Dorma and 50-plus years later, she’s still dead.
Given my disdain for Dorma when Stan Lee wrote the strip, I was impressed “The Way to Dusty Death” (Roy Thomas, Ross Andru, Sal Buscema cover) worked as well as it did. As I said when writing about Namor’s marriage proposal, Roy Thomas wrote Dorma as an intelligent, capable Atlantean leader — if not a great love interest, at least a good one.
In #36 Namor and Dorma go through the wedding preparations, then hold the ceremony itself — at which point Dorma transforms into Llyra, the half-Lemurian villain Namor battled in #32. Supposedly dead at the end of that issue, she got better, kidnapped Dorma, and used her powers to impersonate her. Now she’s queen of Atlantis! Oh, wait —it turns out that under Atlantean law, Dorma having signed the marriage contract and performed the warm-up rituals makes her queen, regardless of who stands in for her at the ceremony. Sorry Llyra, would you like some nice parting gifts?
The pissed-off villain swims off to her lair to kill the captive Dorma. Namor wants to save his lady love but he also has to stop Attuma’s latest attack on Atlantis. It’s the classic Who Do I Save? scenario except in this case Namor doesn’t find a way to save both. This leads to him renouncing the throne the following issue and taking the series in a new direction for a while.
Shaking up a character’s love life is a standard “new direction” in comics. Simply introduce a new love interest and you can use lots of familiar tropes: getting to know each other, awkward misunderstandings, hiding the secret identity, oops my girlfriend/boyfriend is evil, all things harder to pull off with an established love interest. In Namor’s case, killing Dorma let Thomas take him in a completely new direction, away from Atlantis and the duties of a monarch, though he would, of course, return down the road.
On the other hand, once a love interest gets serious, they acquire a sort of magnetic pull: shaking things up might be interesting but do you want to break up a relationship that’s become as much a part of the series as the hero’s costume or secret identity? One that fans, and maybe some of the creators, are invested in?
As the Silver Age transitioned to Bronze and new creators started coming in, comics went both ways. Let’s look at the summer of 1971.
By Amazing Spider-Man #98 (cover by Gil Kane), the Gwen Stacey/Peter Parker relationship had been rocky for a while. Gwen blamed Spider-Man for the death of her father and told Peter she couldn’t live with him risking his life photographing the web-slinger. Ms. Stacey fled to relatives in England; Peter followed but never caught up with Gwen, leaving her convinced he’d never tried.
Following the return of the Green Goblin in #96, Gwen returns to New York. Two issues later, in “The Goblin’s Last Gasp” (Stan Lee, Gil Kane), she decides she’s being too hard on Peter. She loves him and even if he insists on associating with Spider-Man, she’s not willing to live without him.
Over the course of the issue, Peter beats up the pusher whose drugs put Harry in the hospital —
— restores Norman’s sanity once again and then, at the end —
Prior to my Silver Age reread, I’d never much been interested in Gwen as a character. I still don’t think she’s a great character — she has nothing in her life besides loving Peter and her Dad — but that said, reading Amazing Spider-Man has gotten me invested in the relationship. If I’d been reading back in 1971, I’d have been convinced that Gwen was Peter’s Lois, his Iris, his HEA. That makes me understand what a gut punch her death two years later must have been.
Steve Rogers ain’t having as much luck in love (perhaps he’s lucky in cards?). Back in 1970, Stan Lee acknowledged his concept of Cap 
was out of step with the zeitgeist. His solution was to have Cap and Sharon break up, then send Steve biking through America on a chopper, just like Easy Rider. Cap and Sharon are clearly pining for each other in the subsequent issues but either Sharon shows up a few seconds late or Cap waits for her to reach out and so the breakup continues.
It’s still continuing in Captain America #139, “The Badge and the Betrayal,” (Lee, John Romita, with Romita on cover) and it’s getting completely unconvincing. Come on, one of you, make a move! Romantically it’s more interesting for having Sam Wilson meet Leila Taylor, a black woman who thinks social workers are useless — their people need warriors, not paper pushers! Despite which, Leila would become Sam’s girlfriend and keep the gig for a few years.
The story is also noteworthy for Stan finally figuring out a new direction for Cap — in the age of dissidents and protesters, why not make him a cop! It seems NYPD beat cops have been vanishing mysteriously while on patrol; the police commissioner asks Steve to go undercover as a patrolman to serve as bait for whoever is disappearing them.
I’m not sure if this decision is Lee being even more out of step or that he thought it would appeal to all the “law and order” voters who supported Nixon (given that he took potshots at that sort of conservative in Spider-Man, I doubt it). However he does tie it in to one of Steve’s issues since Cap’s stories in the early Silver Age, a desire to give himself a life away from being Captain America. It also goes retro by invoking Cap’s WW II days.
Over in Daredevil, Matt Murdock and Karen Page have been slowly breaking up ever since she learned his identity. Karen wants Matt to quit swashbuckling; Matt doesn’t want to lose the adrenaline rush and whenever he tries, something happens that forces him to get into costume. Since taking over from Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway has kept the romantic angst going. While Conway does a better job dealing with Matt’s blindness, Matt’s mopiness goes up to 11 and it doesn’t work.
Karen has been Matt’s dream girl since the beginning of the series. If I’d been reading this in real time, I’d have taken it as a given she and Matt would get back together eventually. Nope; following the loss of her Amazing Adventures strip, the Black Widow moves into DD’s book and his life (cover by Gil Kane).
Iron Man has been unattached since the death of Janice Cord, Tony Stark’s first serious romance. Madame Masque keeps popping up and he’s sort of interested in her but not quite, plus Tony’s buddy SHIELD agent Jasper Sitwell is in love with her too. I don’t know how that plays out but I don’t think Tony gets a significant romance until David Michelinie and Bob Layton introduce Bethany Cabe a few years later.
Conway is currently writing Iron Man, I’ll note, and he’s making Tony almost as mopey as Matt or Peter Parker. It isn’t working for me; Tony’s a serious guy but he’s never been mopey. For that matter, Conway’s making the Black Widow in Amazing Adventures mopey: having failed to save a young man from death, she’s now obsessing that she brings death to everyone she cares about which is a perfectly logical chain of reasoning. Mopey was apparently Conway’s go-to characterization in his early career — no wonder he’s best remembered for his Spider-Man work, because Spidey’s one guy that works with.
While the Incredible Hulk has always been fond of Betty Ross, Incredible Hulk #140 gave him a girlfriend of his own, with green skin no less. In the previous issue, a battle with the sinister Psyklop resulting in Hulk shrinking down to subatomic size. In “The Brute … That Shouted Love … At The Heart of the Atom” (by Roy Thomas, Herb Trimpe and Harlan Ellison, with a Trimpe cover) Hulk lands on a subatomic world, helps the people out and enjoys being honored as a hero. Better still, the land’s ruler, Jarella, falls for him and vice versa. They’re about to be married when Psyklop finds Hulk and drags him back to normal size, unaware Jarella’s world exists as a particle of dust on his clothing.
It’s a remarkably poignant story and Jarella would remain the Hulk’s love, though appearing irregularly, for the next half-dozen years. Then she dies, though Len Wein, who was writing the book at the time, said he would have brought her back.
Surprisingly this doesn’t eliminate Betty Ross from the equation. The following issue 
establishes that Bruce is still in love with her, regardless of the Hulk’s feelings. In “His Name Is … Samson” (same creative team) Betty — recently transformed into crystal thanks to the Sandman — gets a cure from one Dr. Leonard Samson. The doctor, who’s apparently a brilliant physicist as well as a shrink, manages to drain enough energy from the Hulk to turn him back into Bruce, restore Betty to normal (because Hulk energy does things like that) and then transform himself into Doc Samson, strongest psychiatrist on Earth!
Betty spends most of the issue telling Leonard that no, becoming super-strong with green hair doesn’t make him any more desirable. At the end, to Bruce’s dismay, she rushes to Doc Samson’s side (he thought he could master the Hulk. He couldn’t) and goes off with him. It doesn’t make much sense.
BruceBetty (Bannerross? We’ll workshop it) would ultimately outlast all competitors for each other’s hearts and the many changes that have happened to the Hulk since.
Avengers hasn’t given us any romantic developments in a while. Hank and Jan are still married (I guess that’s another relationship guaranteed to last) and Vizh/Wanda isn’t a thing yet. Over in Fantastic Four, Reed and Sue are still fine but Crystal’s had to return to the Inhumans, leaving Johnny frustrated and lonely. Contrary to what I wrote at the link, they ran into each other several more times before Crystal encountered a wounded Quicksilver, nursed him back to health and eventually married him. Johnny/Crystal was done — though of course, Pietro/Crystal didn’t work out too well either.
Thor is noteworthy for trading out Jane Foster, Thor’s dream girl from the strip’s beginnings, as early as 1967. In Thor #136, Odin elevates Jane to godhood, she falls to pass his tests, then he mindwipes her and sends her back to Earth, as shown in this Jack Kirby-drawn scene.
In return, we got Sif, which I assume was mythology-loving co-plotter Jack Kirby’s idea. It was a bad trade. As I’ve complained in multiple past posts (e.g., this one), the mighty warrior of Asgard spends most action scenes doing what Jane would have done — nothing. She watches as her man does the fighting or she stays back in Asgard to keep an eye on things while Thor does the fighting, etc.
Case in point, Thor #190, ” … And So To Die.” (Stan Lee, John Buscema, Buscema cover). The previous issues have involved a mysterious force, Infinity, systematically extinguishing the stars. It turns out that Loki’s last takeover attempt in Asgard gave Hela the opportunity to siphon off Odin’s power, create a separate persona and use that to end life everywhere in the universe, now and forever. Lee tries to make her seem more than a galactic genocide — look, she has nuance!
This is Lee borrowing from a similar speech he wrote for Galactus but it’s even more bonkers here. Rather than taking people when it’s their time, she’s putting an end to the entire universe — that’s not gentle, that’s not fair.
The Infinity plotline starts in spectacular fashion but Lee runs out of steam at the finish. Regardless, Thor does restore Odin to sanity. This pisses off Hela enough that in #190 she shows up to kill him. Odin can’t stop her because if you kill death, bad things result. Sif, however, can stop her, not through being a doughty warrior but because she’s a girl!
Don’t be fooled, Sif’s plea melts Hela’s heart before the issue ends.
I wouldn’t say Jane Foster was a great character. Odin’s opposition to his son’s romance made for some drama, though; with Sif we lose the drama and don’t get anything in compensation. No surprise that at one point the series had Sif and Jane simply merge into one, though it didn’t last (the last time I was reading Thor, it was Team Sif, though that was a long time ago).
Next up, how are the young lovers at DC doing?
