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I realized after posting about My Love<\/a> 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<\/em> and Our Love Stories<\/em>. 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\u2014I 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<\/em> and Our Loves<\/em> that I don’t own so I can continue my studies. <\/p>\n And boy, was it fun to go down the warehouse and talk shop with the dude that’s been workin’ there for 30 years. We were trying to think if there was another Marvel romance title from the period. “There was Millie <\/em>and there was Chili<\/em> but they were like Archie<\/em> rip-offs,” he said. I asked him which came first My Love<\/em> or Our Love Stories<\/em>. He opened up the Our Love Stories<\/em> number one he found for me and looked at the indicia. He looked at My Love<\/em> number seven’s indicia. He looked up at the ceiling and did some number crunching. “My Love<\/em> came out first.” Then he dug out My Love <\/em>number fourteen. The famous Woodstock issue.<\/a> I flipped when I saw it cuz it’s a story drawn by Gray Morrow. The shop guy was like, “Gray Morrow. Hunh. You know he did the layouts for the Spider-Man<\/em> animated cartoon from the ’60s?” I pretended I didn’t know that and egged him on. It was awesome. That kinda shit doesn’t happen on eBay, folks.<\/p>\n So what is it about these comics that’s got me so balled up? I think it’s the workshop approach to how they modeled the look of the two titles. Marvel of course had a house style in their superhero titles. So these same artists (Romita, Buscema, Colan, et al) were doing Spider-Man<\/em>, Daredevil<\/em> and in the Marvel universe there existed romantic tensions (think Matt Murdoch\/Karen Page or think Peter Parker\/Gwen Stacy\/Mary Jane Watson) but those tensions were often submerged in the larger heroic (male) narrative, right? So, here are those same artists let loose on stories that usually get left on the cutting room floor. We see panels of more everyday mundane things that are charged with a different type of tension. Domestic scenes, nightlife scenes, public transportation – all rendered “heroically'” by Romita, Buscema, and Colan, who were adept enough to let up on the throttle and slow the pace. Meaning Colan knew he wasn’t drawing Daredevil<\/em>. He throws curveball after curveball, teasing the reader with varied rendering styles, playing<\/em> around in a sexy, open way that he couldn’t or wouldn’t in Daredevil<\/em>. And that’s the tension for me that comes through. I don’t necessarily think it’s better than his other work, I’m simply astonished at how versatile he and the rest of the crew were at switching approaches, at capturing the look and feel of stories about “real life” that take place in the real world. <\/p>\n It’s been fun to watch my friends reading them out of the stack that I brought to Copacetic<\/a>. They’ve seen this kind of thing but I think they expected the stories to be really bad. To them, romance comics always come across so hokey. The genre trappings are so amped up that I think they were surprised that that some of the stories are actually touching. The girls always say that the stories must have been written by a man and I say, well, in theory, these stories were “told” to Stan Lee the writer. Then I explain the Marvel Method<\/a> to them if they don’t know the scoop. It’s funny how weird it is explaining Marvel Comics “works” to new comics readers.<\/p>\n I’ve been trying to figure out how to study these stories online and get into discussing the artwork. I’m not super comfortable scanning whole stories. It is Marvel after all. I could link to other blogs out there who post whole stories. That might work. But then that’s a lot of clicking around and I’ll lose you to the depths, True Believer. What to do, what to do? See, for me, I don’t dig it when folks scan some panels from a story and then explain what happens in the story instead of lettin’ me read it fer meself. So, hmmmm. I could riff on individual pages and just focus on the art. But, brothers and sisters, the stories are just part of the experience of these groovy, soulful comic books. You gotta see the ads that were never in the regular Marvel mags. You gotta read the letters column and the advice that “Suzan” gives out. These little beauties are very different cultural treasure chests than the other Marvel mags. I’d have to scan the whole comic book to really give you the full picture. Search them out, young ones, I beseech thee. Collecting and reading these gems is a graduate course in itself. And a lot cheaper.<\/p>\n Tangent Warning:<\/strong> And then I got to thinking about this house style aesthetic. And then I got to thinking about the Hernandez brothers and how they sort of have a house style. I know they are all big romance comics fans and specifically Romita fans. I can just imagine Mario, Gilbert, and L’il Jaime reading these titles as well as the super-hero Marvel titles in the ’70s. In fact, I know they did. They told me. The point is that I feel like this workshop was a direct influence on the formation of Love and Rockets<\/a>. No big revelation, I know. But if you think about how romance comics more or less died in the late 1970s and that there are no “romance” comics in the traditional sense anymore – then Los Bros are truly the inheritors of this tradition. They are romance comics. The modern romance comics. They imbue the everyday with the heroic and then bust out and draw something really heroic whenever they feel like it. They have range and it all fits into a look, a world that is iconic and instantly recognizable. The look and feel of the world and the craft applied to render the characters’ feelings<\/em> is spellbinding. I feel for them because they appear to live on the page. The Marvel romances are similar. To me, this early ’70s era of romance comics are more genuine than most from previous decades. So, maybe, maybe, the Bullpen’s craft informed Los Bros and worked it’s way out in their stories. That’s how I see it anyhow. Los Bros understood that it’s about maintaining the level of craft to elevate the level of feeling. And it’s something I see in these Marvel romance titles specifically more than I do in the regular super-hero titles from same era. <\/p>\n **See comments below. There are plenty of alternative or art comics that explore “romance.” But few of them are rendered in a “realistic” style. Dirty Plotte<\/em> could be considered a romance comic for example. But many of these “alternative romance” comics don\u2019t work<\/em> as well emotionally (for me) because the level of drawing or the ability to render realistically isn\u2019t there. It\u2019s precisely this ability to \u201ccarry\u201d much of the emotional weight with elegant, beautiful drawings that makes Jaime the torch bearer of \u201cromance comics.” I’m not knocking something like King-Cat<\/em> or any other alt\/art comics that sort of do romance comics. Those are very emotional comics that work. But what I’m interested in studying is the school that applies a “realistic” approach to romance. And this era of the Bullpen is key in my estimation because of their influence on Los Bros and then how this school lives through Los Bros adapting it and influencing a new generation with L ‘n R<\/em>.<\/p>\n Los Bros also understood that it’s about continuing characters and a universe that feels real. What if Marvel would have done a Gwen Stacy romance comic or a Karen Page junky diary? Isn’t that essentially what Love and Rockets<\/em> did? They created a house style and serialized the universe into an ongoing epic. <\/p>\n I know, I know, I’m rambling. And it looks like I’m running out of time for this week’s episode. More My Love <\/em>to come. So until next week. Stay groovy.<\/p>\n Don’t forget:<\/strong> Sequential Crush<\/a><\/p>\n Grantbridge Street<\/a><\/p>\n
\nThere are many bloggers who are more informed than your humble narrator in regards to romance comics. Please consult these experts for reading some Marvel Bullpen romance comics. I know there are plenty more sites and experts, so please leave a comment if you are one such expert with such a site. Eventually, I’d like to gather up all the links to Marvel’s ’70s romance comics. Please help.<\/p>\n