In our story today, the star Nita Gomez, the Latin Bombshell, is patterned after Ms Vélez. In this version her antics are also distractions that hurt her career. Even her one noble act, taking the blame for an accident committed by her lover and co-star, Jimmy Dean (!!) gets her in trouble.
[SPOILER] The difference is that Nita is really Nancy Grogan from Hoboken. Love comics are meant to send our hearts soaring because the lovers connect by the final panel, and Nita/Nancy finds true love...with the wealthy studio boss. My advice to my female readers is, if you can’t have the guy you love, then marry someone rich. If you can talk him out of having to sign a pre-nup the divorce settlement will be much better.[END SPOILER].
From Quality Comics’ Love Secrets #41 (1954), reprinted from Love Confessions #9 (1951). Artist and writer are uncredited by the Grand Comics Database.
Nice. I wish I could spot the artist, I really like some panels and his depiction of Mr-Right-Guy-Bill, not the usual stereotyped handsome male.
ReplyDeleteI've noticed that colors change in the reprint (Love confession 9 is on ComicBookplus).
HOBOKEN? I'm dying agen!!!
ReplyDeleteOMG Pappity, we luv that pannel "ALL RITE KIDS U AXED 4 IT!" LOL
OMG ur advice 4 L8YS about pre-nups is xactly my life philophosy yo #NeoTrad #Badass
We luv u Pappity awww <3
The key take-away from this story? You can be a chubby old guy and get the Latin Bombshell because all the pretty boys are cheaters and liars and you just have to be a pal and wait it out ... which means they had the "nice guy" syndrome decades earlier (the entitled idea that if you are the nice "friend" to a woman and always there for her then you deserve sex for it.) One wonders where they ideas come from, and it seems it comes from Romance comics!
ReplyDeleteI love when the cop explains the history of the guy that got ran over. He couldn't just be a guy. No, he's literally a saint!
I did an experiment and read the story without any of the captions the first time through and understood it perfectly. Somebody needs to put the typewriter down! I know romance stories need that inner monologue but, yeesh.
Do I remember Lupe Velez! She can be experienced on TCM on occasion. The Mexican Spitfire movies come up once in a while, but she shines in a corker called "Hollywood Party" with a hilarious Tarzan spoof with with Jimmy Durante. A slow burn comedy sequence involving eggs and Laurel and Hardy. Her thick accent and antics are pretty un-PC but I am a big fan of dialect humor.
ReplyDeleteReal nice art on this story.
Thanks Pap!
Mario, Lupe Velez was a talented actress and comedienne. When the camera is on her she steals the show. It is a shame she isn't better remembered for her work.
ReplyDeleteHere is Lupe doing a song from The Girl From Mexico (1939). Also, for those Jimmy Durante fans out there, here is the Schnarzan trailer you mentioned from Hollywood Party.
Brian, you know we have female readers, and I would not want them to think it is a general rule amongst us men that we would act like nice guys just to get sex. OF COURSE WE WOULDN'T DO THAT, LADIES!
ReplyDeleteCaptions: You have to admit the captions are almost sparse considering it is a love oomic. But I'm with you, the story gets along just fine without captions, or most of them, anyway.
Jimmy's bad driving: Running over that poor old hermit, who gives the area "local color" — after Nita sacrificed herself and two years salary to get her boyfriend out of trouble, he runs around with another girl! Those Hollywood types, no morals at all.
J D, well, now we know what it takes to win the hearts of fair maids, being a nice guy (no thanks to Brian Barnes for tipping his hand to our female readers that it can always be a clever ploy).
ReplyDeleteIf you are like me you wonder sometimes what some beautiful women see in some guys. Joe Jackson wondered that too. Maybe they look like "gorillas," but are nice guys.
(Mrs Pappy said I won her over on our first date when I took her to a bookstore, explained how I loved to read, and bought her a book she had always wanted, Don Quixote. That is her memory. I do not remember it at all!)
W8 u responded 2 evry1 butt me.
ReplyDeleteU no I pluggded u on tweeter tha otherer day while promotering my Vine that got 350,000 loops 2 this guy that wants 2 charge $$$ 4 public domain comics on merch so I dont no Y u wuld dis me yo srsly.
ReplyDeleteI liked it! It was fairly breezy, the characters were well-done for such a short piece, and I didn't think the narration was intrusive at all. I wish there had been more of Nita's antics than just the one-page montage; I enjoyed that vicariously, and it felt like it was right from a 30s screwball comedy. Also, I would have preferred that they set up the chemistry between Nita and Bill better, so that his end confession didn't come totally out of left field AND so we could see that he was definitely someone she could love, that she wasn't just "settling" (albeit richly). Overall, it was well done. I didn't even mind the way they threw in the hermit's last-minute revelation, because I actually needed that cad Jimmy Dean Sausage to get his comeuppance!
ReplyDeleteSorry I haven't been commenting so much lately, Pappy, but I have been making sure to read all your postings!
I saw "Hollywood Party" on TV as a kid (though it had the Mickey Mouse "Hot Chocolate Soldiers" number removed). Lupe's egg battle with Laurel & Hardy was excerpted in Robert Youngson's "Big Parade of Comedy."
ReplyDeleteI'm getting a Kurt Schaffenberger/Pete Costanza vibe from the art.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to think about Lupe Velez without remembering Underground artist Jim Osborne's extremely bizarre and graphic story about her suicide that appeared in, if I'm remembering correctly, a comic called Sleazy Scandals of the Silver Screen.
Alicia, my apologies to you. I will try to be more responsive in the future.
ReplyDeleteThanks for plugging me! You are a sweety.
That artwork is by Harry Anderson. Not sure on the inks.
ReplyDelete