Number 2160: The wrong kind of love

Note to younger readers of this blog: there was a time when people had to communicate by telephone (connected by landlines), radio, and by writing letters. Not e-mails, mind you...not tweets, not Facebook postings, but actual letters penned by hand, enclosed in an envelope with an address, and a postage stamp affixed. Can you imagine such a world? I lived through it and yet it seems harder to imagine every day.

Also, before all of those Internet matchmaking sites there were lonely hearts and penpal clubs (usually advertised in the back pages of magazines) for those looking for someone to share their life. I never participated in any of that, because as with modern digital versions, there are too many things than can go wrong. Like for Cindy, who rolls up calendars and puts them in mailing tubes, and decides to enclose a personal note with her address to maybe meet someone “wonderful in my life.” It’s a long shot, fraught with potential problems. And since this is a love comic, there are problems.

Before you launch into this short story from All True Romance #3 (1951), written and drawn by the Iger Studio, please notice the splash panel. That scene does not appear in the story. It looks as if Cindy is in imminent danger. Her sleeve is torn. Uh-oh. Luckily in the story the “danger” is more the rejection by the guy with whom she has had a correspondence. He is a cad, but thankfully no rapist.

Number 1525: Kissin' cop and fem photog find love amidst murder

Happy Valentine’s Day, Pappy readers! I may be a curmudgeon when it comes to hearts and flowers, but hearts and comics, that’s what I like.

On this love-ly day we have a story from a man’s point of view, in this case Detective Mike O'Rourke, who has a bad start to a relationship with news photographer Gay Kane. It is from such beginnings that true love eventually shows itself.

The story is from All True Romance #2 (1951), a comic unique in that all the stories are told from a man’s point of view. That doesn’t mean the women in the stories don’t win, just that the telling is in a form we usually don’t see in love comics.

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I showed another story from this love comic last June. Just click on the thumbnail:

Number 1380: Hated by an unfaithful wife

This issue of All True Romance (#2, from 1951), is notable for the stories being told from the man’s point of view. It’s no big secret that most love comics were written by guys, but this is the first one I’ve seen that appears to have been aimed at males. My theory, told several times in this blog, is that love comics could not have enjoyed the huge success they had in their first couple of years (late forties into the fifties) without having males buying them along with the target female audience.

This is a tale of adultery and divorce. Charlie, the husband, knows his wife, Gwen, is cheating, and she knows he knows. Everyone acts very civilized about the situation, but you can tell the wife’s lover is a cad because he wears a pencil-thin mustache. (His name, Dick, is also a clue to what he is.)

Beware of men wearing pencil-thin mustaches. They are wife-stealers and bounders.

Luckily there is Janet, a sweet young beauty contestant to ease Charlie’s suffering. And when the drama is finished, you can tell in the last panel they are in love because of all the little hearts swirling about their heads.

This looks like an Iger shop job, with some panels, especially of Gwen, that look to have been drawn either by Matt Baker or someone using his style. The quick-and-dirty print job is by some indifferent pressmen on a giant web press of the era. I have done my best to fix the scans.

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Although I hate to dissuade any Pappy's readers of the notion that in younger days I was a great lover, contrary to popular belief this is not a memoir of my affairs. For one thing, I was only seven-years-old when it was published.