On Monday I showed a 1946 superhero story featuring a hidden communist city of gold. Here's a love story about a girl who falls for a Red. “I Fell For a Commie!” is from Quality Comics’
Love Secrets #32 (1953). I posted this story a few years ago, but these are new scans.
Gladys Lynn is very
dumb naïve. She falls in with a communist cell, complete with posters on the wall proclaiming “Stalin Wants Peace” and she doesn’t realize where she is until page 5. Her naïvete is all because she is blinded by love. Things are not what they appear to be with her commie lover, Tom, but I don’t want to give anything away.
Comic historian Jim Vadeboncoeur gives Charles Sultan credit for the pencils, but gives Dick Beck a ? as inker.
So, at one time, commies tried to bust unions, meaning unions were a great American institution and not evil, socialist, and anti-capitalistic things they are now?
ReplyDeleteOh, how times change :)
I normally loves these romance stories, but this one really lacks anything exciting; there's not another player, there's no lost affections, there's no "playboy vs loyal farmboy", and even the anti-communist screed part of it doesn't work at all.
Their plan to destroy capitalism is undermining worker's rights? Uh, I think you've got the plan backwards!
Actually, at one point, major American unions adopted an explicit anti-communism; so it would have made sense for an organization that regarded itself as communist to undermine some unions, perhaps in the hopes of their being replaced by less hostile unions.
ReplyDeleteAs to the broader issue of socialism, there has been a persistent tension in America between those who fairly consistently use the term “socialism” as per its definition, and those who have sold or bought-into various socialist programmes by insisting that they somehow weren't socialism. And the word “capitalism” is just a mess, rather than definitionally opposite to “socialism”.
It sounds like this story took as its model the experiences of Matt Cvetic, chronicled in the 1951 film, "I was a Communist for the FBI":
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Was_a_Communist_for_the_FBI
Karen, I remember the TV show, I Led Three Lives with Richard Carlson as Herbert Philbrick, which had a similar theme.
ReplyDelete