Women in love, women in action

I haven’t tackled romance comics in my Silver Age reread because I never read them as a kid (I did as a tween, hoping they’d offer some insight into this weird thing called “dating”), don’t have any and don’t particularly want to shell out for them on eBay or in reprint collections. No disrespect intended — as Greg Hatcher says in his old columns, it’s good to have stuff out there that isn’t “for me.” I have enjoyed browsing Jacqueline Nodell’s (granddaughter to Golden Age artist Martin Nodell) Sequential Crush blog about them, and the excellent history of romance comics, Love on the Racks.

Lately, browsing the news stand feature of Mike’s Amazing World, I’ve realized that my head canon concept of romance comics does not match reality. In my head canon they exploded into popularity in the late 1940s, then stayed strong into the 1950s and early 1960s. This was an era when a lot of girls married before turning 20; as someone once put it, romance comics were tackling real-life issues (however unrealistically) the readers could expect to encounter in a few years.

Then. as the Silver Age wore on, the genre began a slow death spiral before expiring in the early 1970s. America was changing, girls were changing, dating rules were changing. Options other than marriage and family were opening up. Comics couldn’t adapt.

I was wrong. While many of DC’s books were canceled in the early 1970s, DC didn’t give up on the genre until Young Love bit the dust in 1977. Long enough to enter the era when CB Radio was a cool means to communicate. Although a story titled “I Won’t Kiss That Evil Way” shows just possibly they were still a little behind the times.

Not only that, during the 1960s DC actually upped its game, taking over Young Love and Young Romance from Crestwood Publications. They tried adding a couple more books in the early 1970s, Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love and Sinister House of Secret Love.

Going with Gothic romance didn’t prove the key to reviving the genre; after four issues, both books converted to standard horror comics and ran on through 1974. All that said, the romance genre had more life in it in the Silver Age than I realized.

Now, the action. While browsing Mike’s newsstand when I blogged about comics in ’68 besides DC and Marvel, I came across one I’d never heard of before, Gold Key’s Tiger Girl. Was she a superhero? A white jungle goddess like Sheena and her many imitators? Browsing on line I found this post by someone who’d bought the one and only issue online, part of Gold Key’s brief effort to cash in on the superhero boom.  Tiger Girl is Lily Taylor, a circus acrobat who has an unexplained mental link with the circus’ tiger. Naturally she fights crime. The book (by Jerry Siegel and Jack Sparling) also catered to the spy audience by including W.A.A.V. (the acronym of justice) and I.N.F.A.M.Y. (the acronym of evil) in the story.Until this post on Attack of the 50-Year-Old Comics, I’d never heard of Jet Dream either. A back-up feature in Gold Key’s Man From U.N.C.L.E., Jet was a Hollywood stunt woman who organized a team of her fellow “acrobeauts” to work as freelance troubleshooters. Written by Dick Wood and drawn by Mike Sekowsky, the feature spun off one standalone story, shown above. As the linked post says, it’s hard not to see her as an influence on Sekowsky’s later Wonder Woman reboot.#SFWApro. Art top to bottom by Bob Oksner, George Ziel, Victor Kalin, Jack Sparling, George Wilson, Mike Sekowsky.