Weird Love #1
Written by: Joe Gill and Various Writers
Drawn by: Vince Colletta, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez (credited under Logar), Norman Nodel, Alberta Twerks, Sam Citron, Ogden Whitney and Art Peddy
Inked by: Dick Beck, Bernard Sachs and Various Inkers
Published by: IDW Publishing andYoe Books
Weird Love #1 certainly lives up to its title. It’s not that the stories themselves are frightening, although some of them were clearly intended to be morality tales to scare young people straight and start washing behind their ears before Bolshevism took root in their impressionable young minds. No, the stories simply reflect a very different time and place, or at least how the Comics Code Authority wanted the world to appear. There isn’t a common thread that unites these stories, beyond the fact that they’re all sort of…out there. One story is about communism and the perils of falling in with a bunch of dangerous Reds. Another is about a woman who winds up in an insane asylum. One happy comic features a domineering wife whose shrewish personality is fixed by a good spanking. Yet another comic illustrates how to overcome snoring in a good relationship.
Romance comics were part of the first wave of adult comics that appeared after 1945, partly as a reaction to the “kiddie” status that comic books were saddled with. After 1954, the strict censorship of the Comics Code Authority meant that taboo topics like sex were not going to appear. The era of romance comics waned after the sexual revolution and by the late ‘70s the genre had effectively ceased to exist. The censorship didn’t necessarily stop absurd story-lines from appearing, however, and that’s the beauty of these tales.
The art quality for these comics is sort of all over the place. The comics that were illustrated in the ‘50s look are somewhat better drawn, although they still resemble comic strips out of the newspaper. Love of a Lunatic! is probably the best one here, as the character’s expressions and movements are all as overwrought as the dialogue. The gasps of shock and expressions of rage all belong in silent films, and they’re hilarious to see here. As the comics move farther into the ‘60s, the illustration becomes a lot cheaper, which is especially obvious in You Also Snore, Darling!, one of the fanciful tales in this volume. The Taming of the Brute, also published in the late ‘60s, has the same wooden art style, with characters that only have two or three facial expressions that they can use to emote.
While the art may be good for a laugh, the real purpose of this comic is to bring the reader as many MST3K, so-
bad-they’re-good moments as possible. Truth be told, I wish there were more. Some of the later comics are more on the side of being hokey rather than awful. When they’re awful, though, they’re really gut-bustingly bad. There’s a panel in Love of a Lunatic! when the afflicted young woman sees her lover in the insane asylum and he smacks her, bringing her back to her senses. In I Fell for a Commie, there’s a panel where we can see communist propaganda, which is nothing more than a big white sheet that says “Stalin Wants Peace.”
It sounds as though IDW is planning to print more of these, which will be a good thing. If the laughs are somewhat inconsistent, they’re also pretty amazing when they come. It’s hard to tell whether they’ll focus more on the grotesquely awful or the quaintly awful comics in the future, but if you want to step back in time and get a sense of what Betty Draper might have been reading as a kid, this is the comic book for you.
– Zeb Larson