Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Various
Artist: Various
Release Date: 2nd July 2014

I was all over this release when the reviews were announced for this week – ‘Weird Love’, I mean, who wouldn’t be? This anthology collecting ‘sleazy romance comics’ from the 50s is presented ‘as is’ – that means no digital retouching, out of registration printing and, often, hastily inked and lettered art. As such, this is more of a museum piece than an attempt at rehabilitating the stories for a modern audience, which is just the way I like it. Histrionic, often exploitative, but kind of refreshingly naïve (no knowing winks or post-modern self-reference here), most of these strips follow a fairly formulaic route – girl finds herself in a situation she wants to get out of, she meets a guy who can help her get out, there’s a twist that shows he isn’t what she seems, but just when her hopes are dashed, there’s a last minute miracle and she gets what she wants (which is often marriage).

The women are hopelessly manipulated, paranoid, delusional or drug-addled, or have body image or self worth issues, and their only hope of being rescued is by a man. You’d never in a million years get away with releasing a current volume of stories like this, and rightly so. It’s lurid in all the worst kinds of ways, and that’s without even getting to the one-page “Dream beau of the Month”, Ronald Reagan…
If that all sounds like a recipe for book-burning, it’s not.

As a peek into a world long forgotten, Weird Love has a compelling kind of, well, charm’s not really the word, but it’s compelling nonetheless. There are two particularly interesting things about this book that make it worth seeking out though. Firstly, all of these stories are centred around women. Sure, they may well have been written by men (only the artists’ names are mentioned, presumably because many of the strips were written by otherwise successful writers of the day), but they are all about women. Which in itself is a peek into a strange comic-book past. I expect the audience for these stories was largely women too.

Secondly, the book is a window into a pre-comic code era, before the self-censoring forced publishers to rethink their strategies, ditching problematic horror and romance books in increasing favour of superhero titles. If there’s one thing to be gained from reading Weird Love, it’s the recognition that the comic medium once splashed about in the wide waters of genre fiction in a way that is all but lost among mainstream publishers today. While we might like to see the histrionics and lurid nature of this type of storytelling tamed and translated into something more appealing and inclusive, it does make me yearn for a time when comic strips had as much diversity of genre as pulp paperbacks did, and still do.

Read it ironically or as an excavation of comic history, but don’t expect nuance or subtlety.

Rating: 3/5.

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The writer of this piece was: Garry Mac
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You can also keep up to date with all his comic releases through the Unthank Comics website.