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…)