Romance Special: What's In A Name?

In order to prepare myself for the run-up to Valentine's Day, I spent a good amount of time last week with my yearly tradition of reading as many Silver Age Romance comics as I could, pausing every so often to stare wistfully into space and wonder if I'll ever find a girl who doesn't mind that I'm... The Wrong Kind Of Guy, but this year, I learned something.

Unless you count the handful of appearances by the dashing and handsome raconteur known as Count Sergio Bellini as a new kind of conflict between man and accent, there are essentially only six plots for romance comics, and as we can see from Heart Throbs #117, four of them tend to revolve around having your sister mistaken for your girlfriend. So the question is, how did the guys who wrote these things back in the sixties keep from going completely insane with boredom?

Answer: Careful word choice.







Ah, the pure joy that is DC's Young Love #83. My work here is done.