Publisher: IDW
Writer: Various
Artist: Various
Release Date: 7th May 2014

The novelist LP Hartley famously said “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Reading IDW’s Weird Love, that quote doesn’t even come close to describing how utterly alien to modern sensibilities these stories are.

A compilation of romance stories from old pulp comics, Weird Love shows that it wasn’t just the Horror titles that were full of bizarre concepts. In fact, some of the ideas in here are infinitely more disturbing and challenging than anything the Crypt Keeper would have unveiled.

I Fell For A Commie is an unintentionally hilarious tale of Watergate-era forbidden fruit, while the heroine in Love Of A Lunatic’s suitably insane tale of paranoia is calmed down with a sharp slap to the face from her true love.

A particularly baffling one-pager sees an obnoxious boyfriend dumped for his jealousy and ends with him thinking “Women! You can’t trust any of them! She wasn’t worthy of me anyway!” And that’s it. What???

Every story is an eyebrow raiser, but the pick of the bunch has to be The Taming Of The Brute. It starts with a beach bully knocking a man to the sand ( no sign of Flex Mentallo, sadly) before forcibly kissing his girlfriend, telling her “Don’t try to pretend you didn’t like it, ducky!”

Needless to say, she does like it, but then spends the rest of the story emasculating her new boyfriend into a henpecked husband and generally becoming the villain of the piece. It’s ok though, he’s only playing possum ’til she comes to her senses (after he puts her over his knee) and realises the man she fell in love with was that brute she met on the beach. Phew!

Viewed through modern eyes, these stories are shocking, but as a time portal to a different age, they’re fascinating and amusing in equal measure.

It does make you think that Dr Fredrick Wertham should have targeted the Romance comics instead of the Horror ones though. The ideas in Weird Love are *much* more likely to corrupt and rot the brains of impressionable youths!

Rating: 4/5.

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The writer of this piece was: Jules Boyle