ROMANCE
WITHOUT TEARS
Fantagraphics
Books 2004
John Benson (editor)
by Laura Picard
You're not alone if you assume that comics are a man's game. More accurately, a boy's, carried tenderly into manhood and cradled their indefinitely (sacredly, if you know the same guys I do). And if you look at the long line of superhero and horror rags dating back to 1939, it's not an unreasonable assumption. But back in the early spring of comics' glory -- the late '40s to early '50s -- there arose another genre that catered specifically to women, and centered, predictably enough, on romance.
Surprise! That's where the predictability ends. Comics have always been a curious hybrid of the conventional and the outré, happily conjuring up Mom-and-Apple-Pie normalcy only to subvert it with the evil and eerie, the subterranean currents running in a dark river just below. Jump back to those comix femmes of the '50s -- heroines you'd assume would emulate every Joan Crawford or Joan Wyman weepie of the era -- and what do you instead find?
The first squeaks of rebellion, natch.
After a 20-year lockdown on female sexuality (the 1930's backlash against the teens' and twenties' sexual liberation), these suburban and working class gals are starting to break the rules again -- asserting their sexuality, wondering if their boring "normal" boyfriend is exactly what the libido ordered, lusting after the "wrong" guys and - golly -- discovering that they're actually the "right" ones. Romance Without Tears' round-up inducts you into this world of subtle social rebellion -- gleefully and in luscious four-color spreads. And the prurience factor is as quaint today as it was inflammatory 50 years ago.
Written by one of the few female comic scribes of the day, Dana Dutch, and rendered by Matt Baker in the appropriately lush-lipped, torpedo-breasted style of the era, these pre-feminist confessionals have all the titillation a '50s adolescent could crave, but a mother'lode of real-life lessons for the average Josephines who found themselves increasingly at odds with an outdated social order.
Consider Doris, who decides to turn the tables on the demure, wait-to-be-asked female propriety of the day by taking on the role of male aggressor in I Set a Trap for a Wolf - But Snared Myself Instead! She subverts those same "Rules" that so recently resurfaced in our own enlightened era -- and chases, wins and woos her desired object. Or travel along with Terry in Loneliness Made Me a Pickup. Surely only disaster can await such a desperate, unseemly plotline, but loneliness not only doesn't ruin her, it brings her true love. So much for social orders.
More treasures await both social historians and comix fetishists. If you're wondering about how your own moms or grandmoms managed to get it on way back then in the Paleolithic era, here's a secret window into their real world.
It wasn't that much different than our own.