I’ve got yet another romance comic to share with you that deals with a woman whose size is judged by society to be less than acceptable, and this time around we finally enter the ’60s … while at the same time offering what turns out to be my favorite single panel from any story of this type.

If you’d like to play catch-up before diving in, check out “Was I Too Fat to Be Loved?” (June 1949), “Too Fat for Love” (Winter 1950), “I Was a Fat Girl” (February 1951), and a second “Too Fat for Love” (March 1952), which I present in chronological order of publication so you can follow the changing times, rather than the order in which I found and shared them with you.

Completists might also want to check out a few other comics which, though not romances, offer a lesson on the subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages being sent to readers, such as My Little Margie‘s “Chubby, But Oh My!” (Dec 1957), and two stories from the pages of Brenda Starr, in which the reporter’s cousin Abretha Breez, who in January 1949 is mocked for not being able to fit into a kitchen to get cake, in July 1949 gets a boyfriend who appears to appreciate her the just way she is.

But on to the new!

“Too Fat to Frug,” from the January 1967 issue of Love Diary #47, was written by Gary Friedrich—who would shortly thereafter write Marvel’s Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and go on to co-create Ghost Rider—and reportedly drawn by Tony Tallarico. I’m as uncertain as are the reference sites as to whether this is truly by Tallarico, as to my eye it looks little like the work of his with which I’m most familiar from the pages of Creepy and Eerie.

In this 8-page story which leads off the issue, go-go girl Sharon Carr is the top dancer at The Bird Cage. And she immediately falls hard for the club’s new singer Bus Wayne. One thing’s for sure—it probably wasn’t because of his lyrics! (more…)

Step One: Go back in time to 1959 and pick up a copy of Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #14.

Step Two: Drool over the prizes offered in the Charlton Giant Contest, especially the First Prize of a Buster Crabbe swimming pool—named after the Olympic gold medalist who later portrayed both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. (more…)

Not sure why the editors at Charlton felt a need to publish a comic attacking those godless communists on the other side of the Iron Curtain in Love Diary #23 (September 1962), surrounded by the standard romance stories you’d expect to find in such a title, but for some reason, that’s exactly what they did.

“God is Never Out of Style,” drawn by Rocke Mastroserio and written by (your guess is as good as mine), instead of being about a woman’s search for true love, is rather a stern warning not to “scoff at the beliefs of our forefathers” and certainly never “be tempted at times to put your religion second.”

A check of the Grand Comics Database shows that this incongruous one-pager ran eight times, first in Teen-Age Love #27 (August 1962) and last in I Love You #44 (February 1963).

Bottom line—go to the beach instead of church and it’ll be your fault if we lose the Cold War!

I have no idea what teens thought about the story 50+ years ago, but since we won (we did, didn’t we?), I take it they took its message to heart.

I thought I pretty much knew everything about comics. But thanks to The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes, I just learned a couple of things more. And in case you didn’t know these two facts either …

Charlton Comics was created by two guys who met in jail

Charlton was the home of such superheroes as Captain Atom (co-created by Steve Ditko years before he went on to co-create Spider-Man), The Question (where I got my first taste of Ditko’s Ayn Randian pontificating long before I ever encountered his Mr. A), and others.

But it all began because someone got arrested for copyright infringement:

In the early 1930s, Italian immigrant John Santangelo, a bricklayer, was encouraged by a girlfriend to produce a magazine that printed the lyrics to popular songs. His effort landed him behind bars for copyright infringement. In jail, he got a crash course in copyright law, courtesy of fellow inmate Edward Levy, a disbarred lawyer, and they joined forces upon their release to start a legitimate publishing house, Charlton.

Which basically means, no copyright infringement—no Watchmen!
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