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Marvel Romance Redux
Book Released: 03 May 2006
Review posted: 01 May 2006
Writer: Palmiotti, David, Giffen, Langridge, Lieb, Parker, et alia
Artist: Colan, Romita, Kirby, Colletta, Mooney, Heck, et alia
Letters: Dave Lanphear
Publisher: Marvel
2.90 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by J. W. DeBolt Jr.
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In the 1950s, romance comics began their brief ascension into the air traffic corridors of periodical publishing, partially filling the void left after Dr. Frederic Wertham and his cohorts shot Avon, B&I Publishing, Atlas, EC Comics and other horror and crime publishers out of the newly-censored sky. With new limitations on what to produce, surviving publishers turned to romance comics, among others. Romance comics never gained a huge amount of popularity, but they did have a run through the 1950s, 1960s, and even into the 1970s.
Many of your favorite writers and artists worked on romance because, hey, you have to make a living and go where the market is. Atlas/Marvel’s Patsy Walker comic told high school romance stories with light humor in them — milder than that of slapstick-style Millie the Model. Patsy Walker ran for a decade with writers Stan Lee, Paul S. Newman and others and drawn by artists including Ruth Atkinson, Al Jaffee, Al Hartley and Morris Weiss.
Humor attempts by Marvel have included What The…?! (making fun of superheroes in the early 1990s), Aaargh! (covering non-superhero-related humor in the 1970s but only running five issues), and the wonderful Not Brand Ecch of the late 1960s, though none sold like gangbusters.
Now, Marvel Romance Redux has combined the two low-selling genres of romance and humor — or rather, used romance comics as a template for pure amusement. Here, Marvel has
Marvel Romance Redux uses romance comics as a template for pure amusement.
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taken the original art of old romance stories it owns, including Patsy Walker stories, and written new words in the existing word balloons and narration blocks. It can’t be too easy a task, telling a whole story and making it funny within the given structure, but this actually works — mostly by the sheer silliness of making fun of the art in a panel and of the mod fashions of the time, allusions to sex, and sending up the whole romance style, but you’ll find a variety of other laughs as well. Each issue contains around five or six stories that are just short enough so that the running gags don’t get tiring.
In the story “Patsy Loves Satan,” the protagonist works as an assassin and starts dating Satan. When Patsy asks Satan to cause her boss’s wife to spontaneously combust, at her boss’s request, he assents, and Patsy thanks him for taking care of such a small problem. Satan replies, “Well, I am the one who’s in the details, after all.” In “A (Former Child) Star is Born,” a card shop owner runs into a former child star whom she recognizes, and he says, “Yeah, that’s me. But little Skippy’s all grown up now — and out of rehab. And prison. And this real nasty place where they hook parts of you to car batteries for money.” The plots aren’t important and the laughs aren’t sidesplitting. But as you read one funny line after another, they build up to a point where you have to laugh.
In these pages you’ll see art by Gene Colan, John Romita Sr., Jack Abel, Sol Brodsky, Dick Giordano and John Buscema. (Mr. Colan’s art is the only really distinctive art, but I’m sure the artists back then had to work within well-defined limits to make the art consistent.) Marvel might as well make use of the properties it owns, like Patsy Walker (who later become Hellcat. I guess when romance comics floundered, she had to follow the market for a job as well.). The writers daring enough to desecrate these
As you read one funny line after another, they build up to a point where you have to laugh.
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old pages include Jimmy Palmiotti, Frank Tieri, Peter David and Matthew Manning.
This new series of one-shots is not quite like the humor titles mentioned above. This is much closer in spirit and execution to Marvel’s Monster Madness magazine of 1972-1973, where Stan Lee wrote humorous captions on publicity stills from old monster films. Now, those were funny. Don’t ask me why. I just get a knee-jerk gut-busting laugh (and that combination can be painful, so watch out) when I see a picture of Frankenstein’s monster, played by Boris Karloff, running with his arms outstretched with the caption saying “Mabel! Mabel! The Ajax turned blue!” (From an old commercial — look it up, youngsters.)
These one-shots are more like that. Maybe instead of one-shots, it’s buckshot, spattering us in an attempt at hitting the right buttons for humor. If you’ve got big buttons, you’ll like this. It’s easy to take something and make fun of it, but here the writers do well. Some of the shots do hit their targets, eliciting a chuckle or three and, yes, even on occasional guffaw, because, admit it, you just have to laugh at the silliness. And that’s quite refreshing in these dark days of civil wars and infinite crises.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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