Fighting for Love on the Cover of Romantic Hearts #9, Up for Auction

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Editor William Ok. Friedman was decided to check the limits in the wake of the 1954 Senate Hearings on comics, and Romantic Hearts #9 is an instance.

Master Publications and its associated corporations are finest remembered by historical past for their Pre-Code Horror output, however Romantic Hearts #9 helps cement their place in romance comedian e-book historical past as effectively.  As historian Michelle Nolan places it in her indispensable Love On the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics, “Perhaps no better example exists than Romantic Hearts #9 of what some romance comics had become in the days before the Comics Code Authority imposed self-censorship on the industry.”

“The classic cat fight cover on Romantic Hearts #9 — one of the few in the history of romance comics — represented an apparently unintentional parody of pretty much everything the Fredric Wertham-inspired critics would have abhorred, though the issue appeared well after the psychiatrist’s anti-comics screed, Seduction of the Innocent, hit bookstores earlier in 1954,” Nolan additionally famous. “There were, of course, numerous passive-aggressive conflicts and tears on the covers of old romance comics, but this was something different — one of the wildest, weirdest covers ever slapped on a comic book that purported to deal with real life.”

I’ll disagree with Nolan on only one level right here — I feel Master Publications editor William Ok. Friedman was very intentional about making this cowl precisely what the ethical panic critics claimed to abhor.  Writing about Pre-Code Horror difficulty Dark Mysteries #19, which was additionally edited by Friendman and hit stands not lengthy earlier than Romantic Hearts #9, I famous that “It almost seems like the editor of Dark Mysteries was purposefully testing the boundaries at this point — and I think this just might have been what was happening.  Because Dark Mysteries publisher Master Publications had an editor who had made a career of helping publishers test limits.”

Romantic Hearts #9 and Dark Mysteries #19, hit the newsstands in mid- to late-1954.  Master Publications editor, William Ok. Friedman, additionally the proprietor of writer Story Comics amongst others, testified in entrance of a U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency earlier that 12 months, with these points maybe in the planning phases or manufacturing shortly after he gave his testimony.

As Friedman’s snug sparring in that testimony implies, this was not his first brush with defending publishers towards authorities censorship.  He was additionally a lawyer, and In 1934 he took on New York City over Commissioner of Licenses Paul Moss‘s actions in ordering 59 magazines off the newsstands there, together with a quantity of pulps.  Among different pulp publishers, Friedman represented Harry Donenfeld, who would quickly change into the writer of DC Comics however was then the writer of pulps together with Pep Stories, Spicy Stories, and Gay Parisienne.

Friedman was identified to be extraordinarily hands-on as an editor, so the indisputable fact that the likes of Romantic Hearts #9 and Dark Mysteries #19 contained so many parts that  Wertham and the Senate frowned upon was in all probability no accident.  Friedman was accustomed to the perceived boundaries and was keen to check them.  And that is doubtless why, as Michelle Nolan once more notes, “Romantic Hearts was a good example of the type of book the Comics Code Authority wanted to censor, or preferably eliminate.”

Romantic Hearts #9 (Master Publications, 1954) CGC FN+ 6.5 Cream to off-white pages. Only copy to have been licensed by CGC to this point. Cat combat cowl. CGC mistakenly indicated that is from the first collection of the similar title revealed by Story Comics. Overstreet 2023 FN 6.0 worth = $39; VF 8.0 worth = $74. CGC census 1/24: 1 in 6.5, none increased.

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