‘Sex, Drugs and Ronald Reagan!’
Great Sunday afternoon reading in Weird Love #2, which reprints some of the more controversial and outrageous stories from vintage romance comic books, predominately from the 1950's, Highlights of issue 2 include 1953's ‘Yes, I Was an Escort Girl’ and the jaw-dropping ‘Too Fat for Love’ from 1950. The groovy counter-culture era is also represented in 1972's ‘Mini Must Go!’, and there’s a Ronald Reagan ‘Dream Beau of the Month’ profile taken fro...m the pages of Sweethearts #111 (May 1952). I never read romance comics as a kid (like most boys, I was all about superheroes, horror, sci-fi, crime and war), but as an adult I can appreciate not just some of the lovely art but the sheer sensationalism and luridness of many of their stories. More than any other comic book genre, it seems the romance titles of the 1940s/50s came closest to reflecting the same skewered and wholly unrealistic window into (then) contemporary modern mores and values as the classic social guidance and classroom education films did at the time.
