Sudsy

I've never seen the appeal of soap operas. Even in college, when everyone would rather sit down for hours and watch All My Children and The Young and the Restless instead of studying or going to class, I would rather... well, it certainly wasn't studying or going to class.

It's undeniable, however, that they're popular. Millions of people watch them daily, mainly women, and they often will follow the same show, the same characters, for years.

In the 60s, Marvel revolutionized super-hero comics, and many of their stories became soap-opera-like. Romance, heartache, double-crosses. And, as it became very obvious, people loved them.

DC, by now not really the innovator that it was and would be again, tried their hand at the soap opera gimmick with a couple of their romance titles. In Heart Throbs, there were the "3 Girls", a storyline over 25 parts that followed the love lives of 3 Manhattan ladies sharing an apartment (and men). And in Secret Hearts, it was "Reach for Happiness," of which the above cover (issue 110) has the first installment.

The first two stories in the issue (If You Ever Leave Me Again and My One and Only Love) were touched up older stories (to modernize the hair and clothing styles), but the third, coming in at 15 pages, is the doozy.

Reach for Happiness, according to the opening panel, was "The day-by-day story of real people trapped in a whirlpool of life and death, love and hate, laughter and tears, as they reach for happiness", and it featured a group of California young men and women, many of whom either doctors or nurses (a romance comics staple) or actresses and models (another staple). The art was by Gene Colan (who did several romance stories after returning to comics, just before heading over to Marvel to draw Daredevil and Sub-Mariner), and it showed a lot of emotion. But for the most part, the characters, unlike their television counterparts, had little depth, and the story was predictible.

Although bother the Heart Throbs and Secret Hearts serials lasted for over two years, they didn't revolutionize romance comics, and only slowed down their eventual disappearance.

But it was a good try.