ROMANCE COMICS 521
of 1949, when only 42 romance issues hit the stands with dates of January through
June. St. John and Harvey, then both minor publishers, got into the fi eld with the
fi fth and sixth romance titles respectively, Teen-Age Romances and First Love. Th e
always-enterprising Simon and Kirby then produced Young Love #1 (February–
March 1949) and quickly followed with the fi rst Western-romance hybrid, the
short-lived Real West Romances , with #1 (April–May 1949), thereby precipitating an
ill-fated craze for Western-themed romance comics over the next year. (Despite their
rapid demise, these comics represented an interesting attempt to merge traditionally
male- and traditionally female-oriented genres.)
Th us, over a 21-month span through June 1949, there were a grand total of only
57 issues devoted to romance. An explosive expansion followed. With publishers
rapidly becoming aware of sales fi gures, no fewer than 256 issues dated July through
December 1949 had romance themes, covering 118 titles and 22 publishers, including
no fewer than 64 issues dated December alone — more than in the fi rst 21 months of
the genre’s existence. In all, more than one in fi ve comic books published in the second
half of 1949 was devoted to love. Marvel Comics produced 27 titles, totaling 47 issues
in 1949; during the same 12 months, Fox’s numbers were 18 titles and 52 issues, not
counting a plethora of rebound/reprint 25-cent giant issues.
Ironically, the two companies that would eventually dominate the romance fi eld,
National (DC) and Charlton , took few early chances as romance publishing began. DC,
which published more than 900 romance comics through 1977, was a minor part of the
second-half rush in 1949, beginning the highly successful 180-issue run of Girls’ Love
Stories and starting the hybrid Romance Trail , which lasted only six issues. Charlton, a
minor song-hits magazine publisher that was just beginning its line of comics, converted
Tim McCoy Western #21 to the fi ve-issue run of the obscure Pictorial Love Stories , begin-
ning with #22. Charlton went on to publish more than 1,400 romance issues, dominating
the numbers, if not the quality, of the 1960s and 1970s when the only serious competitor
was DC. Charlton and DC together produced well over one-third of the nearly 6,000
romance issues published from 1947 to 1977.
Heart Th robs #1 (August 1949) began a successful seven-year fl ing with romance
for Quality Comics , which had been one of the leading heroic publishers of the
Golden Age, with many of the most imaginative costumed heroes, illustrators, and
cover artists. In fact, Quality creations Blackhawk , Plastic Man , and Dollman even
managed to hold onto their own titles in the face of the industry’s costume hero purge
of 1949–50. By the second half of 1949, however, Quality decided to focus on other
genres, including starting 14 romance titles from August 1949 through January 1950.
Quality came up with the most evocative titles in the industry, including Heart Th robs ,
Love Letters , Flaming Love , and Campus Loves , and often set stories in exotic locations,
ranging from South Seas islands to Hollywood fi lm sets.
Simon and Kirby’s Crestwood titles had serious competition not only from Quality,
but also from publisher Archer St. John’s comic line, which was a solid second-tier pro-
ducer of numerous genres for a decade beginning in 1947. Not long after St. John began
