This is not an early April Fools joke!
Did you know Archie Comics once published romance comics?
No, not like this!
Like this...
and this!
Like almost all comics publishers at the end of World War II, Archie (then MLJ Magazines) experienced a major drop in sales as action-oriented comics (and super-heroes in particular) fell out of favor with readers.
Luckily, one of their other characters, Archie (along with his supporting cast), proved extremely-popular, and quickly replaced the super-heroes in various titles like Pep Comics and Top-Notch Laugh Comics (which became Laugh Comics) as well as new solo titles for Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead and others.
In fact, the company was renamed Archie Comics in 1946!
But that didn't mean the company had abandoned non-Archie concepts!
Due to sales generated in 1949 by then-new romance titles like Young Love, Archie jumped into the brand-new (to comics) teen and young adult women with two titles, Darling Love and Darling Romance published under the Darling Magazines imprint!
Though most of the tales were of the usual breathless "true love" type, a few were stories surprisingly-mature (more in the vein of soap operas), such as this never-reprinted one from Darling Love #8 (1951)...
Illustrated by Harry Lucey (who was also one of the primary Archie artists at the time), the subjects include "older man/younger woman", "widower with child remarrying", and "inadvertent motherhood"
The two comics were bi-monthly on alternating months and lasted only two years (1949-1951) before being forced out by a glut of romance comics flooding the newsstands as every other publisher entered the compeetition.
Neither series has ever been reprinted!
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