Put Up Your Dukes

In my first installment of why I think romance comics (as my mother would say) went the way of all good things, I talked about the idea that the new comic artists and writers coming into the business in the 70s wouldn't enjoy creating love stories. Since nobody made any comments against this assertion, I will assume that everyone agrees with me. (The best way to win any argument is by not having anyone argue with you about it in the first place.)

I kid.

Anyway, another big issue regarding the loss of romance comics is the fact that it wasn't only that romance comics were dropping left and right, but comic companies themselves had (since the mid-50s) begun disappearing at an alarming rate. From '50 to '77, companies that published romance comics that went out of business (or stopped producing comics) included EC, Ziff-Davis, Fawcett, Ace, Star, Superior, ACG, Fox, St. John, Quality, Prize, Avon, Ajax/Farrell, Lev Gleason, Standard, and many more.

By the early 70s, what publishers were left? DC (which absorbed several titles from Quality [Heart Throbs] and Prize [Young Love, Young Romance]), Marvel (which had attempted to revise romance comics with My Love and Our Love, otherwise hadn't produced romance comics since the final issues of Love Romances in 1963), Archie and Harvey (which never produced romance comics to begin with), Atlas (a short-lived publisher with only one romance title, the magazine Gothic Romances), Charlton (which had around 6 romance titles going up until the 70s), and Dell/Gold Key/Western (which had no romance titles). (If I'm forgetting something, which I probably am, please remind me.)

So you went from a time 15-20 years earlier, when there were dozens of publishers putting out anywhere from 15-30 (or more) romance titles a month, to three publishers with around a half-dozen titles coming out any one month. This is against 40-50 super-hero titles, a dozen teen humor series, plus the latest cartoon/TV comics, etc.

(Also of note, none of these now-defunct publishers stopped publishing romance comics before they went out of business. They were all just part of their larger line that stopped publishing altogether.)

The comic publishers that survived into the 70s were mostly of two ilks -- they were super-hero/horror/sci-fi publishers (Marvel and DC) or they were specialty publishers (Archie, Harvey, Gold Key). There really wasn't anything out there any more that mirrored the publishers of the 50s, which would have many different titles with many different genres. And because of that, niche genres (like romance or war or western) got squeezed out. The fewer the number of titles published in a certain genre, the smaller the market, the smaller the number of people who were aware of them, the fewer the number of people who would buy them.

I really think that there could have been a market for these titles. Westerns could've thrived or horror (which mostly disappeared by the late 70s) or romance. But they just weren't there. There weren't enough to challenge the dominating super-hero titles.

The same goes today. It's difficult to get a genre in edgewise, when all you're seeing on the stands are spandex-clad do-gooders. Yes, there are tons of non-super-hero comics out there, but go to most comic shops, and they're pushed off to the side, outcasts. Unloved.

So to sum up, that's my second key to why romance comics failed: they didn't have a fighting chance.