Love on a Dime

As Presidential Candidate Wintergreen had once discovered, Love was sweeping the country. On newsstands all over the U.S. last week, new-style comic books with such come-on titles as Sweethearts, Romantic Secrets, Teen-Age Romances and Young Love were outselling all others, even the blood & thunder variety. The sexy, slick-covered romance-mongers --souped-up soap operas in new wrappers--were rolling off the presses as fast as publishers could think up new names.

Love's biggest pressagent was Fawcett Publications, already a big name in the pulps (True Confessions) and adventure comics (Captain Marvel, Tom Mix). Fawcett's Sweethearts was up to the 1,000,000 mark, and Fawcett's Life Story was runnerup with 700,000 readers. But almost everybody was doing it. At 10-c- a throw, America's girls & boys, aged 8 to 80, would soon have their pick of 100 love & romance books, published by two dozen different concerns, with an average press run of 500,000 copies. Said Fawcett's Helen Houghton last week: "It's the trend, and it's terrific."

Hearts v. Chests. The trend was so terrific that some of the old-style confession magazines confessed that they were in trouble. Macfadden Publications, biggest tell-all in the business (True Story, True Romance, Experiences), refused to convert to the new comic format when Fawcett did. Thereupon the bottom dropped out of Macfadden's market: after netting $224,883 in the first quarter of 1949, it reported a second-quarter loss of $11,635. Admitted Macfadden's Dwight Yellen: "No doubt about it--the confession comics have hurt our field a lot."

It had taken a bit of doing, but the love & romance comics had succeeded in doing the impossible: they had found a way to simplify the "I see the cat" prose long purveyed by the older pulps. Like the pulps, the comics generally pictured handsome heroes with hearts of gold, equally handsome villains with chests of gold, and beautiful heroines with obvious reasons for being led astray. The moral in all the stories was dutifully plain: justice and virtue eventually triumphed.

Dollars v. Dreams. In the current issue of Feature Publications' Young Romance, the original love comic, a spoiled deb learns that not all her father's money can buy the ideals and dreams of a starving rural doctor. In Avon Periodicals' Campus Romances, a girl who steals examination notes to win a boy's love is shocked to hear him say: "If you'd cheat like that . . . you'd cheat in other ways." (Her sadder & wiser conclusion: "I know now that love will come when the time is ripe.") In Super Publications' Love Problems & Advice, an ambitious secretary discovers in the nick of time that $100-a-week salaries and mink coats from the boss are not for just taking dictation.

For pulp magazines, the moral was even plainer: no matter how low their standards for fiction, the comics could find lower ones.

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