I'm Serious!

Although nobody has commented on this (hell, nobody, except for the wife, has commented at all), I'm sure there are some of you readers out there who think that I don't really like romance comics, that it's all just a kitsch thing, that it's just one person's attempt to look hipper-than-thou by grasping at some quirky part of a quirky hobby.

To that, I say hogwash.

I really do like -- no, LOVE romance comics. I think that, beyond their silly stories and dialogue, they are full of a real sense of what the by-gone era was all about, another forgotten part of our past. These stories represent real people, real situations. Sure, they're hammed up and placed in some odd settings, and many of the characters are more ideals than real, but they give you a feel of what the 50s and 60s were about.

A very good friend of mine brought a book to college my freshman year -- The Facts of Love and Life for Teenagers, by Evelyn Millis Duval. Written in 1950 (and revised for paperback later in the decade), this gives the teenager (and older) a how-to for dating, grooming, and *gasp* petting.

It was a great book. Funny, because it was so outdated; silly, because, we figured, even then kids and teens didn't actually talk and behave like that. (My favorite passage was when she described the best way to cool down a petting session so it doesn't go too far. Her advice? Ask your partner to slide on to the other side of the car seat and go get a hamburger.)

I've since collected a lot of these types of books, and while they're great, none have compared with Ms. Duvall's classic (or even her 1965 follow-up, Why Wait Till Marriage?).

Romance comics are for the most part etiquitte lessons in story form. All the how-to's and do's and don'ts are there, and you can learn from the mistakes of the guys and gals in the stories. Aren't sure if it would be a good idea to date a few guys and take advantage of their good graces all at the same time? Well, Teen-Age Romances will give you plenty of reasons not to.

So, I really do like them. My collection numbers around 500, and I've read nearly all of them (the ones I haven't are always on the top of the ever-expanding "to read" pile). And, to my wife's dismay, I'm going to buy and read more of them. And, to your dismay, I'm going to keep on writing about them, too.