Lost Love OUR LOVE STORY "Model with a Broken Heart"

It's a 1970s story with a 1940s "feel"...

...because the scripter was a child of the Swingin' 60s-70s, and the illustrator was one of the greats of the Golden Age.

The story has a weird feel to it, like a 1940s-50s tales updated for the 60s-70s.

But I'm assured this never-reprinted tale from Marvel's Our Love Story #14 (1971) was, in fact, written and illustrated in 1970-71!

Writer Gary Friedrich began scripting Western, military, and superhero comics in the late 1960s, including Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos, the cowboy Ghost Rider, and the Steve Ditko-illustrated Blue Beetle.

But he began his career doing romance comic stories at Charlton!

Later, he would co-create the first Black superheroine, ButterFly and the motorcycling Ghost Rider.

Tarpe Mills was one of few female writer/artists (let alone female writers or artists) in the Golden Age.

Besides working on a number of established series, she created one of the first superheroines; Miss Fury!

Tarpe retired from comics in the early 1950s, returning in the '70s to do this romance story under the pen-name "JT Mills" (short for her full name, June Tarpe Mills) and both a cover... 

...and a limited-edition tip-in plate...

for a Miss Fury reprint trade paperback.

Next Week...

Another Lost Love Story from the 1960s-70s!

You'll Cry Your Eyes Out If You Miss It!

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Marvel Romance: the Trade Paperback!

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Laugh at Love on Valentine's Day MARGIE COMICS "Elusive Valentine!"

Here's a never-reprinted Valentine's Day treat...

...from almost 80 years ago years ago, featuring a teen humor character from the company that later became Marvel Comics!

Until the mid 1970s when Archie Comics became the sole "teen humor" publisher, every company had several titles with wacky teenage protagonists.
Margie, created/written/illustrated by Morris Weiss was typical of the genre...

• Irresponsible, impulsive teen (of either gender)!
• Usually-clueless object of affection!
• Constantly-irritated parents!
• An annoying younger sibling (usually of the opposite gender to the protagonist)!
• Various eccentric friends!

Initially a backup strip that floated to whatever humor comic needed a 5-6 page filler, she finally got her own title by taking over Timely's Comedy Comics in 1946 as of #35 and holding on to it until #50 in 1950, when the book became Reno Browne: Hollywood's Greatest Cowgirl.
Margie went back to being a floating backup strip for another year before disappearing completely, never to be seen again!
This particular tale (one of the few comic tales I could find with "Valentine's Day" in the title that didn't deal with the famous gang-war massacre!) is from Timely's Margie Comics #37 (1946).

Happy Valentine's Day!

John Buscema Tales OUR LOVE STORY "Only One Can Win!"

Though Don Heck is better-remembered by today's fans as a penciler...

...he actually was a rather elegant (though slow) inker, as his rendering of John Buscema's pencils on this Stan Lee-scripted torrid tale from Marvel's Our Love Story #3 (1969) amply-demonstrates!

Because, like John Buscema, he was such a fast penciler, both Marvel and DC used Heck in that capacity, only rarely letting him ink even his own work!
To be fair, Buscema was a faster inker...and John eventually talked Marvel's editors into letting him ocasionally ink his own rough layouts (not full pencils).

Next Week, John Buscema's final romance comic tale, from 1972!

You'll Cry Your Eyes Out If You Miss It!

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Big John Buscema

Comics and Drawings

A combination of complete checklist of Buscema's comic and magazine work and a heavily-illustrated catalog of a 2009 Italian museum exhibition of his work!

Do You Love O Henry's "Gift of the Magi" as Much as We Do?

...we've presented two of them, each with its' own particular charms!

by Gary Gianni

and

by John Fago & Anton Caravanna

O Henry's classic Christmas story of True Love has been adapted into every media format imaginable, sometimes as a period piece, sometimes updated to the present, and, in a couple of cases, projected into the future!

Tomorrow...

Another, rarely-seen graphic retelling of the classic Christmas tale!

You'll Cry Your Eyes Out If You Miss It!

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Gift of the Magi

 adapted by PJ Lynch 

The Woman Who Actually LOVED Scrooge!

When you think of Ebenezer Scrooge, "lovable" is probably the last word you'd associate with him.
Yet, one woman gave her heart to him...was engaged to him...and had her heart broken by him!
Her name was Belle!

She appears twice in A Christmas Carol, during Scrooge's journey with the Ghost of Christmas Past.
First, we see how the young Scrooge choose between his love of money and love of her.
Second, we see how, after the breakup, she married a good man and together they raised a loving family, giving Scrooge a look at what "might have been" had he chosen to remain with her!

Almost every adaptation shows the first incident, but omits the second scene (usually due to running time or page count constraints), thus many people have never known how Belle's life turned out after Scrooge left her!

Here's the section about Belle from A Christmas Carol's Stave Two...
For again Scrooge saw himself.
He was older now; a man in the prime of life.
His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice.
There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.
He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
“It matters little,” she said, softly. “To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.”
“What Idol has displaced you?” he rejoined.
“A golden one.”
“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said.
“There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”
“You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently.
“All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?”
“What then?” he retorted. “Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.”
She shook her head.
“Am I?”
“Our contract is an old one. 
It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. 
You are changed. 
When it was made, you were another man.”
“I was a boy,” he said impatiently.
“Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,” she returned.
“I am.
That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two.
How often and how keenly I have thought of this, I will not say.
It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you.”
“Have I ever sought release?”
“In words. No. Never.”
“In what, then?”
“In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end.
In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight.
If this had never been between us,” said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; “tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now? 
Ah, no!”
He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in spite of himself.
But he said with a struggle, “You think not.”
“I would gladly think otherwise if I could,” she answered, “Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be.
But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl—you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow?
I do; and I release you.
With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.”
He was about to speak; but with her head turned from him, she resumed.
“You may—the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will—have pain in this.
A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke.
May you be happy in the life you have chosen!”
She left him, and they parted.
“Spirit!” said Scrooge, “show me no more!
Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?”
“One shadow more!” exclaimed the Ghost.
“No more!” cried Scrooge.
“No more. I don’t wish to see it. Show me no more!”
But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.
They were in another scene and place; a room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort.
Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter.
The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.
The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands most ruthlessly.
What would I not have given to be one of them!
Though I never could have been so rude, no, no! I wouldn’t for the wealth of all the world have crushed that braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little shoe, I wouldn’t have plucked it off, God bless my soul! to save my life.
As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn’t have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again.
And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents.
Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection!
The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received!
The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll’s frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter!
The immense relief of finding this a false alarm!
The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy!
They are all indescribable alike.
It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.
And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.
“Belle,” said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, “I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.”
“Who was it?”
“Guess!”
“How can I? Tut, don’t I know?” she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. “Mr. Scrooge.”
“Mr. Scrooge it was.
I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him.
His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone.
Quite alone in the world, I do believe.”
“Spirit!” said Scrooge in a broken voice, “remove me from this place.”
“I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,” said the Ghost. 
“That they are what they are, do not blame me!”
“Remove me!” Scrooge exclaimed, “I cannot bear it!”
He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.
“Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!” 

Most illustrators of the many editions that have been printed over the decades have also bypassed the conclusion of Belle's plotline.
But not the celebrated Arthur Rackham!
The legendary illustrator did not one, but two color illustrations just for the short conclusion to Belle's story in Stave Two!
We at Atomic Kommie Comics™ just had to include both of them in our A Christmas Carol collection!
One, Belle & Children shows Scrooge's once-love playing with her kids.
The other, Belle's Family portrays the children crowding around their father (whom, had he chosen differently, Scrooge could have been) as he comes home, laden with presents!

And now, you can have either of them on a host of Christmas collectibles by clicking HERE!

Alex Toth Tales POPULAR ROMANCE "Blinded by Love"

This tale about a love triangle from childhood to adulthood...

...and from lighthearted fun to tragedy would make for a heck of a Hallmark Channel movie!

This poignant Alex Toth-penciled and Mike Peppe-inked story from Standard's Popular Romances #22 (1953) is probably the single-most reprinted tale from any of the company's romance books.

Next Week:

We don't know...yet...what Alex Toth Tale we're going to present!

But we can tell you this...

You'll Cry Your Eyes Out if You Miss It!

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Setting the Standard

Comics by Alex Toth

...which includes the tale presented here and other romance (as well as sci-fi, war, and horror stories) by Alex Toth for Standard Comics!

Alex Toth Tales THRILLING ROMANCES "Chance for Happiness"

Can a war bride find happiness in America with her ex-army husband?

Or will annoying in-laws who look down their noses at immigrants screw the whole thing up?

While the scripter of this poignant tale of redemption and reconciliation from Standard's Thrilling Romances #23 (1953) is unknown, the pencil art is by comics legend Alex Toth (with inks by Mike Peppe) who went from being one of comics' best storytellers to designing/art directing most of the 1960s-70s non-funny animal output of tv animation studio Hanna-Barbera, including Space Ghost, Scooby-Doo, Super Friends, and Josie and the Pussycats!
So, this month, our topic is one particular artist, and we'll be featuring his romance comics art from the 1950s through 1970s!

Next Week:

We Don't Know Which Alex Toth Tale We'll Present...Yet!

But, We Guarantee That...

You'll Cry Your Eyes Out If You Miss It!

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Treasures Retold

Lost Art of Alex Toth