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I realized after posting about My Love last week that there’s no way to write about these romance comics without writing about the search for them, finding stories on blogs, diggin’ thru bins in dusty warehouses. So these posts are gonna ramble. I’m only talkin’ to the True Believers out there who wanna help me study this workshop known as the Marvel Bullpen. And specifically this workshop’s romance comics: My Love and Our Love Stories. These are some of the more difficult Marvel mags to track down for various reasons. I haven’t seen many of them in my lifetime of comics collecting. And they have not been reprinted much at all. So it’s always a shock when I find an issue that I’ve never seen before. Even seeing the covers are a shock. It’s only in recent memory that these things began floating around on the web. The covers weren’t often reprinted in Price Guides or fanzines or even in other Marvel Comics from the period. I like finding stories on the web but it just makes me want to own them, to possess them. I don’t like rare comics shopping on eBay—I want to find it in the comics store and flip through it and decide if I want to buy it. You know, that whole “joy of the hunt” and everything. It’s not until I find it myself, hold it in my grimy hands and smell the newsprint, that I feel connected to the thing. Luckily, I live in a town that has some great secret comics warehouses that have every single possible back issue you could imagine and eventually I found a handful of My Loves and Our Loves that I don’t own so I can continue my studies. (more…)

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Hey there True Believers, welcome to Comics Comics weekend edition. This one is for those of us who love Romita, Colan, Colletta, Buscema, Ayers – the late ’60s Marvel Bullpen essentially. Maybe you’re like me and love all these artists but maybe you get a little tired of reading the same old reprints over and over again, right? Well, the doctor is here with the cure. It’s called My Love.

A re-vamp of the old school Romance comics published in the ’50s and ’60s, My Love was a late ’60s update with the Marvel Bullpen in full swing (It was also a Marvel romance title from 1949 that turned into Two Gun Western at issue #5). Generally, when people think of Romance comics they think of the classic ’40s-’50s vibe or maybe the gawdy but sharp Charltons of the ’70s. But My Love slips right in between there. It has the innocence of Laugh-in with that bright, morning fresh hippie vibe of the late ’60s AND the beginnings of the lurid, graphic ’70s. That’s how I see it anyhow. (more…)