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Marvel Romance
My Love. Teen-Age Romance. Love Romance. Picking up a theme? The romance genre spanned nearly half a century, and now Marvel's picked some of its best from the sixities and seventies! "It Happened at Woodstock," "My Heart Broke in Hollywood," "Love on the Rebound!" Featuring Smart Styles and Heavenly Hairdos with Patsy Walker in a pre-Hellcat tale! Collects Love Romance #89 and #101-104; My Love #2, #14, #16 and #18-20; Teen-Age Romance #77 and #84, Our Love Story #5; and Patsy Walker #119.
173 pages, Paperback
First published February 8, 2006
4 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
About the author
Stan Lee
7,560 books2,347 followersStan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber) was an American writer, editor, creator of comic book superheroes, and the former president and chairman of Marvel Comics.
With several artist co-creators, most notably Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he co-created Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Thor as a superhero, the X-Men, Iron Man, the Hulk, Daredevil, the Silver Surfer, Dr. Strange, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Scarlet Witch, The Inhumans, and many other characters, introducing complex, naturalistic characters and a thoroughly shared universe into superhero comic books. He subsequently led the expansion of Marvel Comics from a small division of a publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.
With several artist co-creators, most notably Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he co-created Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Thor as a superhero, the X-Men, Iron Man, the Hulk, Daredevil, the Silver Surfer, Dr. Strange, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Scarlet Witch, The Inhumans, and many other characters, introducing complex, naturalistic characters and a thoroughly shared universe into superhero comic books. He subsequently led the expansion of Marvel Comics from a small division of a publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
February 14, 2017
Some great artwork in here. Colan, Romita, Buscema, Kirby, Steranko, Giordano, and Brodsky. Stories are short and dated. The Patsy Walker story was probably the only one that made me want more. Historically interesting.
August 21, 2008
I love romance comics, and no, I'm not gay. I just think they're funny, and did you know Roy Lichtenstein admitted he built his career on stealing panels from romance comics? So why don't we go straight to the source!
My favorite stories are the ones where the girl plays hard to get and ends up staying home on Prom Night(sob). And what's up with blonde girls always chasing guys with black hair? Every story has that weird feature.
The cutest girls are drawn by John Buscema, the ugliest ones are drawn by Jack "King" Kirby. Apparently the King could draw supercomputers but was clueless at making chicks look rockin'. The psychedelic love stories towards the back of the book are the funniest and come highly recommended.
Sample heart-wrenching titles: I Love Him-But He's Hers; Formula For Love; I Do My Thing, No Matter Whom It Hurts; Please Don't Le Me Be A Spinster; and my favorite, Someday He'll Come Along.
My favorite stories are the ones where the girl plays hard to get and ends up staying home on Prom Night(sob). And what's up with blonde girls always chasing guys with black hair? Every story has that weird feature.
The cutest girls are drawn by John Buscema, the ugliest ones are drawn by Jack "King" Kirby. Apparently the King could draw supercomputers but was clueless at making chicks look rockin'. The psychedelic love stories towards the back of the book are the funniest and come highly recommended.
Sample heart-wrenching titles: I Love Him-But He's Hers; Formula For Love; I Do My Thing, No Matter Whom It Hurts; Please Don't Le Me Be A Spinster; and my favorite, Someday He'll Come Along.
June 24, 2017
So yeah the stories are kinda awful, but they're also hilarious in retrospect. The art is great, and I love that Marvel reprinted these so we can enjoy them -- for laughs and for history. This was a super popular genre back in the day and it's a shame that it's been kind of swept under the rug.
April 21, 2024
This relatively rare Marvel Comics trade paperback is a bit hard to find, and I settled for a lesser-condition one (with a cryptic label on the inside front cover that reads: “From Caitlin. Two-year AlAnon anniversary, May 30, 2007” … how’s that for very personal documentation?). I think the romance books are a sadly overlooked part of Marvel history, especially some of the late 1960s titles, like Our Love Story and My Love. There are very few character reprints in this book—Millie the Model is absent altogether, and Patsy Walker appears in one story and some fashion/hairdo pages—but the real treat is the art by Jack Kirby (on four different stories; how he fit in these romance stories into his schedule in late 1962 is beyond me), and the late ‘60s stories by John Romita, John Buscema, Gene Colan, and that one amazing Steranko tale from Our Love Story #5. Marvel needs to do a Romance Omnibus reprinting those books; the art by Buscema especially seems like something he was really into, with amazing layouts and illustration, and when you combine it with inks by Romita, it’s incredible.
November 4, 2019
Deep into these pages was my intro to Jim Steranko and, my god! It's the only romance he ever did for Marvel and it's STUNNING and comes with its own creation myth--he supposedly turned in his pages right before deadline so Marie Severin et al would have no time to object to the format and colors he used, wildly different from the norm for romance stories. His style stands out for all the right, gorgeous reasons. Also, I love how much of the writing is credited as "As told to Stan Lee", simultaneously painting him as all women's uber-confidant for their confessions of the heart, and absolving him of any responsibility for the hack storylines. :)
March 27, 2023
Highly recommend. Marvel romance comics of the 60s & 70s are one of the most ignored comic book genres. This collection features stellar work by Stan Lee, John Romita, Gene Colan, John and Sal Buscema, Jim Steranko, Jim Stalin and more. The comic book industry would be a better place if more men had read these books.
October 13, 2017
All this love! I appreciate how not everyone had a happy ending and getting to see how love and romance were idealized in the past.
October 27, 2014
During my early teens in the late 1960s and early 1970s I was an avid fan of Marvel comics, and bought just about all their titles aimed at a male readership; but I never gave a thought to the romance comics which were also part of their line, these being obviously aimed at a female readership. However, I could never get enough of the work of artist Jim Steranko and, when he illustrated a romance story, I had no choice but to put my incipient manhood on the line and purchase a copy of Our Love Story #5. The Steranko story from that comic is reproduced in this collection along with almost two dozen other stories from 1960-64 and 1969-72. There are a few artists like Dick Giordano and Sol Brodsky who I haven’t encountered before and others, Jack Kirby, Gene Colan, John Buscema, and John Romita, who were very familiar from their superhero work. Unlike any of the superhero tales I remember, every one of these stories employs first person narration, male writers serving as ventriloquists for the female protagonists. Stan Lee is inevitably credited with most of the writing; Jean Thomas, whose gender I am unable to determine for certain, may be the only female contributor here.
Reaffirming the taste of my younger days, Steranko’s artwork in “My Heart Broke in Hollywood!” is the standout here, showing the influence of Peter Max and Pop Art in the bright, non-naturalistic colors, textureless patterned surfaces, and thick solid lines that surround and delineate his characters. But though the artwork impresses with its originality, the story itself is basically a re-write of “The Only Man for Me” from a decade earlier, also included in this collection. A more original narrative approach is taken in “As Time Goes By” written by Gary Friedrich and illustrated by Gene Colan. This 1972 story presents a young woman obsessed with the cinematic presence of Humphrey Bogart, to the detriment of her real-world relationship. The telling of the story, again in the first person, presents all the dialogue filtered through the heroine’s perspective and presented in boxes of narration rather than speech balloons. The only speech balloon in the entire story comes from a movie screen, “Here’s looking at YOU, kid!” This subversion of comic book convention effectively emphasizes the heroine’s distancing herself from her surroundings, the only voices reaching her unmediated coming from a movie screen.
The low point of the book is a story with a series character, Patsy Walker, a comic book of which I was previously unaware. A predictably plotted (by Stan Lee) and badly drawn (by Sol Brodsky) 18 page story serves as a excuse to present Patsy and her female friends in a series of dresses and hairstyles submitted by readers, each of whose contributions are acknowledged by name and city in boxes within the panels. These reader contributions seem to have been the raison d’être of this comic, which does not fit well with the subject matter and tone of the other stories in this collection.
Most of the other stories are a series of variations on the theme boy meets girl, a problem or misunderstanding occurs, is resolved, and true love triumphs. Another common plot has the girl start out with the “wrong” boy, break up with him and discover the “right” boy. A few end with improbable scenarios such as “The Dream World of Doris Wilson” where the man the heroine meets turns out to be a comic book artist who makes her the star of the romance comics over which she has been fantasizing. A handful of stories leave the heroine alone at the end, either by mutual agreement, both parties realizing that what they feel is not True Love (“If Your Heart I Break … !”) or due to some misjudgment on the heroine’s part, such as, in “The Summer Must End!”, ignoring a potential mate because of his apparent lower class origins. Such a tale of lost love, “The Boy that Got Away”, ends the collection in a somber manner. In the penultimate panel, the heroine walks away from the reader, down a lane shaded by green leaves, and thinks about her loss; the walk and the thoughts continue in the last panel, but now the trees are bare and snow covers the ground, anticipating by almost two decades a scene from the film “Notting Hill”.
The females depicted are attractive, but with enough variation in features and fashion to make them individuals; the males they love, however, all seem cut from the same pattern: Ken doll types in the early stories, wavy-haired hunks with sideburns in the latter stories.
Some of the stories occasionally use panels employing only two or three colors to intensify the emotion of a moment, whether rapture or heartbreak.
Reaffirming the taste of my younger days, Steranko’s artwork in “My Heart Broke in Hollywood!” is the standout here, showing the influence of Peter Max and Pop Art in the bright, non-naturalistic colors, textureless patterned surfaces, and thick solid lines that surround and delineate his characters. But though the artwork impresses with its originality, the story itself is basically a re-write of “The Only Man for Me” from a decade earlier, also included in this collection. A more original narrative approach is taken in “As Time Goes By” written by Gary Friedrich and illustrated by Gene Colan. This 1972 story presents a young woman obsessed with the cinematic presence of Humphrey Bogart, to the detriment of her real-world relationship. The telling of the story, again in the first person, presents all the dialogue filtered through the heroine’s perspective and presented in boxes of narration rather than speech balloons. The only speech balloon in the entire story comes from a movie screen, “Here’s looking at YOU, kid!” This subversion of comic book convention effectively emphasizes the heroine’s distancing herself from her surroundings, the only voices reaching her unmediated coming from a movie screen.
The low point of the book is a story with a series character, Patsy Walker, a comic book of which I was previously unaware. A predictably plotted (by Stan Lee) and badly drawn (by Sol Brodsky) 18 page story serves as a excuse to present Patsy and her female friends in a series of dresses and hairstyles submitted by readers, each of whose contributions are acknowledged by name and city in boxes within the panels. These reader contributions seem to have been the raison d’être of this comic, which does not fit well with the subject matter and tone of the other stories in this collection.
Most of the other stories are a series of variations on the theme boy meets girl, a problem or misunderstanding occurs, is resolved, and true love triumphs. Another common plot has the girl start out with the “wrong” boy, break up with him and discover the “right” boy. A few end with improbable scenarios such as “The Dream World of Doris Wilson” where the man the heroine meets turns out to be a comic book artist who makes her the star of the romance comics over which she has been fantasizing. A handful of stories leave the heroine alone at the end, either by mutual agreement, both parties realizing that what they feel is not True Love (“If Your Heart I Break … !”) or due to some misjudgment on the heroine’s part, such as, in “The Summer Must End!”, ignoring a potential mate because of his apparent lower class origins. Such a tale of lost love, “The Boy that Got Away”, ends the collection in a somber manner. In the penultimate panel, the heroine walks away from the reader, down a lane shaded by green leaves, and thinks about her loss; the walk and the thoughts continue in the last panel, but now the trees are bare and snow covers the ground, anticipating by almost two decades a scene from the film “Notting Hill”.
The females depicted are attractive, but with enough variation in features and fashion to make them individuals; the males they love, however, all seem cut from the same pattern: Ken doll types in the early stories, wavy-haired hunks with sideburns in the latter stories.
Some of the stories occasionally use panels employing only two or three colors to intensify the emotion of a moment, whether rapture or heartbreak.
July 7, 2022
GOOD STORIES, WELL WRITTEN AND DRAWN
Modern-day online reviewers seem to be falling all over themselves trying to write about how superior and sophisticated they are, compared to these stories. Unfortunately those reviews tell you more about the reviewers than this actual book.
I read it with an open mind and found it enjoyable. Most of the tales are six-eight pages long, so dramatic conflicts tend to resolve themselves at a faster pace than, apparently, what vintage Marvel readers are used to. But they're still engaging enough to be worthwhile to read. The art is fantastic, with pencilers like John Romita and John Buscema providing virtuoso storytelling that is well worth the time of anyone who loves comics.
The only thing I didn't like was the reprint colors, which are of the neon retina-burning "on blast" variety that we so often get with reprints of classic comics. And it seems like they're rubbing it in to those who love the original colors - like me - by showing us examples of those gorgeous original hues in the table of contents. My problem with it is a lot of the finesse of the original art by the penciler and inker gets really lost with the neon color treatment. But trying to buy originals of these comics is now an expensive proposition, and considering how expensive and rarely seen they are, this is not a bad way to jump in and get your feet wet and see how you like them.
Most of the online reviewers seem to be objecting to this genre itself - romance stories written to appeal to female readers. Well, it was a popular genre for 50 years, so if you're a comic history buff, better try and find a way to deal with it, because it did happen.
Modern-day online reviewers seem to be falling all over themselves trying to write about how superior and sophisticated they are, compared to these stories. Unfortunately those reviews tell you more about the reviewers than this actual book.
I read it with an open mind and found it enjoyable. Most of the tales are six-eight pages long, so dramatic conflicts tend to resolve themselves at a faster pace than, apparently, what vintage Marvel readers are used to. But they're still engaging enough to be worthwhile to read. The art is fantastic, with pencilers like John Romita and John Buscema providing virtuoso storytelling that is well worth the time of anyone who loves comics.
The only thing I didn't like was the reprint colors, which are of the neon retina-burning "on blast" variety that we so often get with reprints of classic comics. And it seems like they're rubbing it in to those who love the original colors - like me - by showing us examples of those gorgeous original hues in the table of contents. My problem with it is a lot of the finesse of the original art by the penciler and inker gets really lost with the neon color treatment. But trying to buy originals of these comics is now an expensive proposition, and considering how expensive and rarely seen they are, this is not a bad way to jump in and get your feet wet and see how you like them.
Most of the online reviewers seem to be objecting to this genre itself - romance stories written to appeal to female readers. Well, it was a popular genre for 50 years, so if you're a comic history buff, better try and find a way to deal with it, because it did happen.
February 1, 2015
Something of a missed opportunity in that as a collection, Marvel Romance undersamples Marvel's Silver Age era. A Romita-heavy collection, or a complete set of the 1968-1970 titles would have been more representative of the strengths of the material. You do get the lead story from My Love #2 by Buscema and Romita and Steranko's peerless "My Heart Broke in Hollywood", but the pre-1962 stories come across as colourless and sterile, and the excess of 1972 stories somehow look less modern than their counterparts from the late 1960s (Jim Starlin's contribution only hints at what he'd later achieve, and Gene Colan's work lacks the utter smoothness of Romita's).
February 2, 2008
UGH. A collection of vintage romance comics.
Con: Totally Morally Objectionable.
This book was basically like reading the plots someone would make up with Barbies. Kissing, betrayal, TONS of male chauvinism taken as love.
Pro: Style!
I am a sucker for wacky 50s/60s clothes and hairstyles. Primary colored hair hooray!
Read it, but be prepared to so offended by the absurdity that you will laugh out loud. Phew.
Con: Totally Morally Objectionable.
This book was basically like reading the plots someone would make up with Barbies. Kissing, betrayal, TONS of male chauvinism taken as love.
Pro: Style!
I am a sucker for wacky 50s/60s clothes and hairstyles. Primary colored hair hooray!
Read it, but be prepared to so offended by the absurdity that you will laugh out loud. Phew.
May 30, 2012
A truly enjoyable romp down memory lane to a time when I filled notebooks with fancy frocks for Patsy Walker and cute coiffs for her and her comic book paper doll friends, okay so I always made their boyfriends have secret identities as super heroes but I was as likely to use my dime to buy the latest Stan Lee Romance as I was too buy Superman's latest adventures. I recommend this collection for those born to late to see this softer side of Stan Lee, or for those like me who knew and loved it.
December 17, 2007
romance jadul & bapuk... 60's & 70'5 pokoknya jaman sebelum g lahir!!! but i learn something here.. when it comes to love, just listen to your heart....
and logic (hehehe... ga usah baca buku semua org jg tau ya??!)
and logic (hehehe... ga usah baca buku semua org jg tau ya??!)
December 5, 2014
Well i knew i wasnt getting the best comics stories ever told here, but these were a doozy. even for romance comics, the plots were hackneyed and predictable. some decent art by steranko, buscema, colan, heck, and romita sr, but couldn't save these silly stories from their own contrivances.
July 8, 2014
It's your typical romance comic anthology. I enjoyed it but not enough to think that the plots got a little repetitive. But you know, it's still awesome in my book.
February 22, 2015
God, yes. These are the comic books that I cut my teeth on. My mom's old comics. Collected here, and so awesome.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews