“FEAR, GUILT, LOVE, AND SHAME!” — VICE
MAGAZINE
“The comic book industry’s most obscure and outrageous stories! Simply must be read to be believed!” —Dave Colton, USA Today
“JAILBIRD’S ROMANCE!”
“Craig Yoe and Clizia Gussoni are the Masters and Johnson of oddball, Cold War-era, sexytime comics!” —Dan Greenfield, 13th Dimension “Some of the more depraved love stories of the 1950s. If that’s not something you’re into, I don’t know if we can be friends anymore.” —Topless Robot
LOVE
TM
AND MORE
“Weird as hell. Each one more bizarre than the last. I went into this comic thinking that I knew what to expect and was still blown away!” —8th Dimension Comics “This blew my f****** mind. This is going to sound strange, but I would love for a feminist studies class to dissect these stories because the way the women are perceived was the most interesting aspect for me.” —Comic Bastards “Each of the stories were a kitschy brand of fun and I never missed IDW’s wink at the sheer lunacy of some of the narratives and dialogue that seem so ridiculous to us now. The art was enjoyable to behold in a delicious Andy Warhol ‘pop art’ sort of way. And while I fully embraced my time in this Weird Love world, it only further reminded me of why I am always glad to have been born a woman in the later part of the century.” —Watch Play Read
“LURID!”
—13TH DIMENSION
“OUTRAGEOUS!” —USA TODAY
“Few comics re-packagers have remained as steadfastly committed to the idea of comics as disreputable art as Craig Yoe. Yoe and his crew of digital tweakers present this entertaining crap with a historian’s affection and a winking recognition of its essential silliness.” —Blog Critics
“DERANGED!” —WIRED
“The best reprints in the history of comic books ever!” —Decapitated Dan
...and much more!
Presented by
This is a
YOE-MANCE Publication
™
Visit YoeBooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-63140-782-6
CLIZIA GUSSONI and CRAIG YOE
$29.99 US
Introduction by
idwpublishing.com
CAROL TILLEY
Dedicated to Greg Goldstein, the godfather of Yoe Books!
If you like this book, please blog; post on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Amazon, and Goodreads; podcast and tweet about it! Visit YoeBooks.com Join the Facebook group, Romance Comics! Become a fan of YOE Books on Facebook! Friend Craig Yoe on Facebook! Our heartfelt gratitude to Heidi MacDonald, www.ComicsBeat.com. Deep thanks to Giovanna Anzaldi, Robert Carter, Tillmann Courth, Dan Greenfield, Mike Howlett, Michelle Nolan, Chris Ryall, Steven Thompson, and Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Many thanks to our proofreaders: Mark Lerer, Peter Sanderson, and Steven Thompson. YoeBooks.com Craig Yoe & Clizia Gussoni, Chief Executive Officers and Creative Directors • Jeff Trexler, Attorney • Mark Lerer, Peter Sanderson, and Steven Thompson, Proofreaders and Fact-checkers • Steven Thompson, Publicist. IDW Publishing: Ted Adams, CEO & Publisher • Greg Goldstein, President & COO • Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist • Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief • Matthew Ruzicka, CPA, Chief Financial Officer • Jeff Webber, VP of Licensing, Digital and Subsidiary Rights • Jerry Bennington, VP of New Project Development • Dirk Wood, VP of Marketing • Lorelei Bunjes, VP of Digital Services. ISBN: 978-1-63140-782-6 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 November 2016. First printing. Weird Love: “Jailbird’s Romance” and More! (Volume 4) is © 2016 Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. All Rights Reserved, including the digital remastering of the material not held by copyright owners. Yoe Books is a trademark of Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. Yoe is a registered trademark of Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. IDW Publishing, a division of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 2765 Truxtun Road, San Diego, CA 92106. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of the contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Printed in China. IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork.
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I grew up in the 1970s and with the exception of some 1940s and ’50s Archie comics my grandparents bought for me at flea markets, my comics were all pretty banal. Had I known about books like Strange Confessions or Lovelorn, I might not have had to fill my brain quite so much with imagined assignations between me and Richie Rich’s Gloria Glad or Archie’s Veronica (or Betty, depending on the week) or, yes, Peanuts’ Peppermint Patty and Marcie. Even though my conscious brain didn’t figure out that I’m a lesbian until I was 22, my elementary school-aged subconscious clearly knew what was up. Without really understanding what was going on in my brain, I knew I was different—that who I loved was different—from most everyone else in my small town. Would my life be significantly different had I grown up reading, “I Was the Wholesome Type” or “Innocence Was My Angle!”? Probably not. Would they have helped me figure out sooner that I was gay? Maybe. Stories like these and others collected here and throughout the Weird Love volumes present readers with different visions, different choices, different expectations for living and loving. When they were published, these comics allowed readers to see something other than the normative monogamous perfection presented on the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal or on television in shows like Donna Reed. Sometimes the courage to acknowledge one’s own differences—whatever they are—comes in realizing that normal and perfect are actually pretty scarce compared to different and weird. Comics like these peeled back the veneer on then-contemporary US life, and that seems to be one thing even young comics readers appreciated. A young girl who was part of Wertham’s “Hookey Club” said that reading romance and love comics allowed her to see “other people’s stupid mistakes.” She went on to propose that boys read these comics, “to laugh [at] how stupid the girls are.” I suspect, though, that the boys read them for the same reason: to see the mistakes, the imperfections, the weird. Oh, and the headlights. They definitely read
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OPPOSITE PAGE A pretty weird love cover! Confessions of The Lovelorn #112 (March 1960, ACG).
them for the headlights. (No doubt headlights generated interest for some girl readers too!)
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ABOVE Dr. Fredric Wertham said, “Children call these ‘headlight’ comics.” Youthful Romances #11 (April 1952, Pix-Parade).
So, what do the comics in this volume show us about what lay beneath the veneer? The weird is plentiful: a story narrated by a house, a woman who almost says “I do” to polygamy, an animal rights advocate who falls madly in love with a bullfighter. At the same time, the weird seems a little bit like veneer too. The characters from one story to the next are visually indistinct from one another. That’s not a slam on the art: instead I see those choices as a bit of genius in allowing readers to place themselves on the page. Behind the premises are simple messages like, stand up for your values, sometimes things really are too good to be true, and trust your instincts. Readers are reminded that people gossip, change, cheat, lie, and even die, but the stories’ writers nearly always serve up redemption. Trust, patience, honesty, and, yes, love win. Most of the time.
Imagine, if you will,Wertham and his wife reading these stories. They are splayed on their Gramercy Park sofa, limbs entwined and cigarettes grown ashy from neglect. They’ve shoved aside Dark Legend and pore over copies of True Love Problems and Advice Illustrated, My Past, and Confessions of Love that Wertham’s young patients have brought to show him. It’s not the trudging sort of reading he makes it out to be in Seduction of the Innocent. They chuckle, ask each other to read silly panels, and reflect on how they—an imperious but charismatic Germanborn psychiatrist and an intensely private sculptor who graduated from Wellesley—got here. That would make for a great comic in another volume of Weird Love. Disguised as a mild-mannered Midwestern college professor, Carol L. Tilley is actually the Comics Crusader. Her 2013 research debunked some of the evidence used by anti-comics advocate Fredric Wertham. An in-demand speaker, Tilley’s current work is reclaiming the stories of comics readers and fans from the Golden Age.
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