518 ROMANCE COMICS
more than 7,500 pulp magazines were devoted to romance from the 1920s through
the 1950s. Only the Western —featuring nearly 10,000 issues of the approximately
40,000 total issues published from 1896 to 1960 in more than 1,000 pulp titles—was
a more dominant genre (and a number of pulps combined the two genres). Concur-
rently, hundreds of romance stories appeared every year for more than six decades in
the weekly or monthly “slicks,” such as Th e Saturday Evening Post , Coronet , McCall’s ,
Liberty , and Redbook , along with the multitude of newspaper Sunday supplements of
the era, plus the movie magazines and the lower-brow “true confession” magazines,
which were printed on slick paper but had more in common with the pulp market.
Beginning with the fi rst of the modern pulpwood paper publications for adults, gener-
ally recognized as Frank Munsey’s Argosy in 1896, romance stories appeared in many
of the general-interest pulps before the pulp market exploded during the 1920s.
Pulps, indeed, were huge infl uences on the people who published, created, and in
many cases read the nearly 150 romance comic book titles that suddenly appeared in the
second half of 1949 and the fi rst half of 1950. Street and Smith’s Love Story Magazine ,
the best-remembered of the romance pulps, ran 1,158 issues from 1921 to 1947 and
was so popular it was among the few pulps published weekly during most of its exis-
tence. All-Story Love Tales , begun by the Munsey Company and much later sold to the
prolifi c pulp purveyor Popular Publications, ran 582 issues from 1929 to 1955. Ranch
Romances , published from 1924 and the last pulp standing when it disappeared in 1971,
ran 860 issues from three publishers. Many other titles from several leading pub-
lishers enjoyed huge commercial success, including Th rilling Love , Rangeland Romances ,
Sweetheart Stories , Cupid’s Diary , and Love Book Magazine.
Comic books, though, were late to come to the romance profi t party. Th e early
modern comic books, with origins in the mid-1930s, were primarily anthologies of
newspaper strips (including a few with romantic elements) until Superman debuted in
Action Comics #1 ( June 1938). It took more than a year, but Superman and fellow cos-
tumed hero Batman , who began in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939), brought about
dozens of highly successful costumed heroes who began fi ghting crime in 1939– 41,
before World War II took center stage. By the end of the war, hundreds of colorful,
bizarre, and fanciful characters had been created. As the Golden Age of Comics waned
in the 1946–50 period, the vast majority of these characters disappeared until a hand-
ful of the best were revived and/or modernized in the late 1950s and 1960s, creating
the Silver Age. Replacing them on post-war newsstands were crime comics, horror
comics, humor comics, fantasy comics, Western comics, and romance comics.
Before romance could gain a foothold, however, the teen humor genre came fi rst,
complete with dozens of adolescents longing, panting, and scheming for the atten-
tion of the opposite sex. Following the template of Andy Hardy in the movies and
Henry Aldrich on the radio beginning during the Great Depression, Archie Andrews
made an inauspicious debut in the MLJ company’s superhero titles Pep Comics #22
(December 1941) and Jackpot Comics #4 (Winter 1941– 42). Archie was not the
fi rst teen in comics —his own company created the earlier non-related Wilbur for
