Anyone
who disparages romance comics probably
A. hasn't read any and is
instead thinking of Roy Lichtenstein paintings and, more importantly,
B.
hasn't read any created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the enterprising
gents who created the genre in comics.
The stories compiled in
Young Romance 2, originally printed from 1947-1949, are dense,
compelling little dramas; they could be short films churned out by
Warner Bros. in the '30s. They deal with class systems, espionage,
culture clashes, small town bigotry, post WWII societal problems,
gossip, poverty and prejudice. They're hard-hitting, sometimes
spectacularly violent. These aren't your laughable '70s DC romances
drawn by Vince Colletta. Kirby crams detail into each panel as if
he's directing a 1918 silent film; the art has much more in common with
his late '70s Marvel comics like Machine Man than any of the '60s comics
he's most known for.
The hardbound book is beautiful. Unlike
what's promised on the front and back cover, the restorations published
within aren't scanned from the original comics with printing dots
intact. Instead, they were exposed to a solution process which
eradicated the colors, leaving the black art behind. Once digitally
enhanced, the result is black and white art amazingly faithful to the
original. Although I prefer editor Michael Gagne's restorations from the
first volume, the new process makes for immanently readable stories,
using a color palate faithful to the original comics and set against a
nice light beige background.
Or pure genius? I can't decide.
It would have been great if editor Michel Gagne had listed credits for the material in his Young Romance: The Best of Simon and Kirby's Romance Comics.
The two western stories included weren't penciled, or inked by Jack Kirby. My vote is for Jack Davis, while another comics fan suggested Bill Draut. In any event, it ain't Jack Kirby.
A beautifully restored (by Michel Gagne) overview of Simon and Kirby's romance output, from 1947 to 1959.
As we know from previously reading Simon and Kirby romance comics, the early years are the hardest hitting, with dense, detailed, almost claustrophobic art, social concerns comics hadn't addressed before and characters you care about who seemingly stepped out of '30s Warner Bros. films.
The post-code stories, by contrast, are glib, short, drawn quickly (i.e. cranked out) and border-line bizarre in their heightened abbreviations of romance story tropes and formulas.
There's been recent discussion online as to whether Kirby wrote these stories. I don't think there's any doubt he wrote most of them. The book is filled with his cadences, word choices, sentence structures, rhythms, ideas, themes and very deliberate ways of expressing himself.
Specifically, much of the writing here sounds quite like the unpublished romance comics Kirby wrote and drew for DC in the early '70s. For better or worse, Kirby's writing sometimes had an unintentional formality, a sometimes awkward, didactic way of expression that was uniquely his, God love him for it. Who else could have written, "The years that bound us were snapping cords of living tissues that inflected horrible pain upon us both as the hand of death reached to sever the last remaining strand..."? From "The Town and Toni Benson!"
Or, try this line on for size: "I didn't see the descending blow! Its devastating impact was transmitted to me through its unfortunate recipient." From "Sailor's Girl".
And: "My meeting with Sophie Morrison Scott recalled to my mind the jungle sequence of an old movie in which the unarmed native having been frozen into immobility by the ominous low rumble of sound behind him, turns slowly about - and watches with terrible fascination the stealthy movements of the tigress as her sleek, cat-like shape emerges into full view...peering out of Sophie's blase mask was a predatory animal poised to spring..." Great stuff, from "The Town and Toni Benson!"
I highly recommend this book, published by Fantagraphics.
