Return To Romance, Ogden Whitney's Comics

The thing about being a woman is you always have to pretend to be interested in characters in books and movies to whom you don’t quite relate. I don’t relate 100 percent to men in suits, or men with guns, or men pining after women, or anguished male artists in paint-splattered pants, or men sailing ships, or men making money. I relate, at best, 74 percent to these men. And then I do the work, make the mental leap, bring myself the extra 26 percent so I can really enter the story.

What I can potentially relate to 100 percent is women. Women in flowing bow ties, women cleaning floors, women chopping wood, women knitting, women leading countries, women wrestling wild animals, women raising kids, women making eyes at men, women making eyes at women, women doing nothing at all. Some of the books and movies I come across are about women, but not enough. It’s fun to read books about people who are different from you, but not if your own story is so excluded that you feel erased.

The women in Ogden Whitney’s comics live to find love. If they are distinguished, or distinguishable from one another, it is only in order to offer a different spin on the tried and true form of the romance story. They are vivid characters, but their vividness exists solely to attract the attention of men. Although there are plenty of talented and interesting women in the pages of Whitney’s Return to Romance, clichés still abound: if they know how to cook, that’s good. If they don’t know how to dress, that’s bad. The edgy beatnik character in “Beat Romance” turns out not to be a beatnik after all: she’s a polite, healthy coed, top of her college class—not a threat to the status quo, and therefore deserving of romance.

Our knowledge of Whitney is shadowy. He was born in 1918 in Massachusetts and later lived in the Bronx. At twenty he began working for Detective Comics, Inc., which is now DC Comics, and from there created a number of superheroes, the most famous of which was Herbie Popnecker, a fat, unhappy child who wields a magic lollipop. Whitney drew the romance comics in the early sixties, when New York comic book publishers were trying to use love stories to reach a new audience of teenage girls. Unlike most of the artists drawing romance comics in that period, however, he didn’t use stock plots but likely invented his own; their pacing and interest in social relations, even within the confines of the genre, are part of what make them worth reading today. Whitney’s life was marked by its own romance. By all accounts a lonely, withdrawn man, he married Anne Whitney in 1958 at the age of forty. (She was forty-two.) Their marriage coincided with one of the most fruitful, inventive moments in his career, and when she died in 1970, he is said to have been overtaken by alcoholism and madness.

 Are these comics sexist? Sure they are. They depict the female stereotypes of a very sexist, very white Protestant, early sixties American society, where a woman’s highest calling—higher even than cleaning and cooking—is to attract a man by being lovely and pointy-breasted, a light dancer, an easy laugh, supportive of the man in all his pursuits, and fun without being threatening. It’s a stupid, quietly violent thing to tell a woman: that her vocation is to be pleasant to men, and her supreme goal is to be chosen, kept, erased by one reassuringly tall, clean-shaven fellow. But it’s even more of a violent thing to tell a woman indirectly, by not putting her point of view in the book at all. I’ve been told these things indirectly all my life. It’s a relief, in these comics, to hear it said out loud, said to us, so we can make of it what we will. These comics won’t turn you into a sixties housewife. They’ll remind you, with a rush of fairy-tale feeling, that you are an I. With the great power that comes with selfhood, perhaps you’ll be able to identify the sixties housewife living inside you. So you can gently thank her, and let her go.

Here’s my confession: Not only do I not mind Whitney’s romance comics, I love them. I find them touching and empowering and human. The stories are ridiculous. They have a lot of charm and are beautifully crafted, but it’s not hard to see behind the scenes and think, This is a world where everyone is a white American Protestant, and where a woman’s sole value is in her desirability to men. This is propaganda. I will take it with a grain of salt. The romance comics don’t hide their retrograde politics. They make them clear, so you can concentrate on reading, and not expend the usual energy weeding out the sexism cleverly hidden in art and pointing it out to others. I also think, by some miracle, Whitney really understands and empathizes with his female characters—Margie Tucker, the “hopelessly dumb” farm girl with a heart of gold; Nancy Wilson, the pug-nosed scientist; Roxanne Farr, ambitious president of Roxanne Frocks, Inc.; Cindy Lamb, the spunky coed; Meg Foster, the self-abnegating aunt—the way Anton Chekhov and Alfred Hitchcock (who was a terrible person, by the way) do.

These comics are fairy tales. They tell you that you’re chosen and precious. It’s true, they tell you, that no one notices how special you are now, but notice is within reach: all you have to do is lose a few pounds, do your hair differently, buy a new dress, and everything will be wonderful. Fairy tales were originally oral histories, told from mother to daughter. A woman, as a daughter learns from her mother, is not a full human being. A woman is a storybook character, like Prince Charming or Santa Claus. She can act only according to certain rules. She lives in fairy tales. Once your mother has told you a fairy tale, the character of the woman lives in you, too. You can’t get her out. She’s tied up with you, but she is not you. We are blessed and cursed to have her, just as we are blessed and cursed to be able to give birth to our own daughters, if we wish, and teach them these lessons, too.

What is a woman? She is all things good and lovely. Often unrecognized, and kept down by forces less incorruptible than herself, she prevails by force of sheer quietness. How, specifically, does she prevail? By winning the man: Prince Charming. Like most of the female characters in great romantic books and films—Philip Roth’s women, Junot Díaz’s women, Haruki Murakami’s women, Wes Anderson’s women, Woody Allen’s women—Prince Charming is alluring but opaque. A love object. How delicious and rare for a man to be seen in this way. For a woman to be the one watching him. Even if, ostensibly, according to the story, she’s only watching him watch her. Astrid Franklin, in the title story—who loses her dreamy husband by neglecting her looks and wins him back by changing her hair style and clothes, losing weight, and putting on makeup—is one-dimensional. But her feelings—low-level depression, then devastating loss, then blinding realization, and then triumph—are all the more relatable for it, and so gratifying. And there is so much pleasure in a happy ending: Astrid Franklin wants only one thing from life, and her wish is granted.

Fairy tales are a twisted thing. Femininity is a twisted thing. It’s a kind of religion. As for Prince Charming, I will never have him, and I don’t want him. But don’t make me give up my longing for him. Tell me about it again and again. Tell me fairy tales the rest of my life.

From Return to Romance, by Ogden Whitney, edited by Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro, published by New York Review Comics, 2019.

The Charming, Ridiculous Romance Comics of Ogden Whitney. By Liana Finck. The Paris Review, October 21, 2019. 

NewYork Review Comics

Although I am an avid lover of humor, sci-fi and horror comics, I had not delved into romance until recently (smut, its transgressive step-sibling, is another matter, and a topic for a different day.) Tasked with drawing a weird love story for an upcoming anthology, I realized how little I had read in the genre, and set to rummaging through my long-boxes for research material. As a compulsive collector, I hoard the comics I buy at shops, thrift stores and junk sales for years sometimes before reading them, and I was excited to find an issue of DC’s Young Love from 1967 and Charlton’s I Love You from 1964 buried in the wreckage.

To say I was disappointed with their contents is an understatement. I should have expected the phonebook style drawing, wooden dialogue and universally saccharine endings, but I was still caught off guard. Teen humor comics had left me besotted with strong-willed firebrands like Bunny Ball and Betty and Veronica, so I wasn’t prepared for the bland-as-milk ciphers with generic features and even more generic names that populated the pages of my romance comics. The yearning young WASPs with sculptural hairdos and their objects of desire-all of the Chucks and Randys and Marvins blended together to form an Adam and Eve of blandness,  an ur-couple sleep-walking across a sound stage, enacting the same domestic rituals over and over, like Bud the zombie in Day of the Dead whose encounter with a telephone represents his last link to a forgotten humanity.

Right as I was writing off the genre entirely, serendipity arrived: Return to Romance, a collection of Ogden Whitney’s romance comics edited by Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro, with a show-stealing introduction by Liana Finck landed on my doorstep. The book, published by the always-reliable New York Review of Comics, collects 9 stories drawn by Whitney and likely written in collaboration with Richard Hughes, his editor at American Comics Group, where he worked from 1950 until 1967, steadfastly churning out books in near-total anonymity.

And therein lies the real love story for me. The ardor of a comics-lover for a forgotten but deserving artist, and their passion to bring him or her to a wider audience. It happens in every medium, but the conditions were so dire in comics, with artists working so hard and so fast for such small rewards, that even those with successful careers often died poor and in relative obscurity. Every cartoonist secretly hopes for a Santoro and Nadel--someone to advocate for their work when they are unable. Bill Boichel, owner of Copacetic Comics in Pittsburgh, who collected the floppies from which these stories were culled, also deserves a mention.

This is not the first time Nadel has gone to bat for Whitney. In his 2005 collection Art Out of Time, he introduced many of us to Herbie Popnecker, the rotund adolescent with the magic lollipops, whom Whitney claimed was based on himself. The artist, who struggled in his latter year with alcoholism and mental illness, seems to have channeled a unique brand of anxiety into his romance comics. While the stories I encountered in Young Love and I Love You were light pieces of fluff about chance encounters on trolleys and jealous friends at parties, the stories in Return to Romance are psycho-sexual powder kegs. The title story in particular, featuring Astrid Franklin, a wife so devoted to caring for her husband Stan that she neglects her appearance, practically driving him into the arms of a more attractive woman, would be absolutely hair-raising even if Astrid didn’t then go on a punishing doctor-prescribed fitness regimen in the hopes of winning him back.

Ken Harrison, the protagonist in “I Want a Real Man”, serves as the male counterpart to Astrid Franklin. After accidentally killing a man in the boxing ring, the kind-hearted pugilist, overwhelmed with guilt, renounces his former life and takes a job as a secretary at a fashion house, Roxanne Frocks, where he endures endless verbal abuse from the company’s president, Roxanne Farr. The “happy ending” here is that is her constant attacks were all part of Roxanne’s plan to help Ken reclaim his lost virility. Both characters are badly punished for stepping outside the bounds of conventional gender roles. Roxanne’s viciousness is so over-the-top that one can’t help but wonder, hopefully, if Whitney really didn’t secretly intend her to be a villain.

Nevertheless, the desire, the yearning on the part of the men and women in Whitney’s stories, to be anyone but themselves, to almost literally claw out of their own skin, into a better, more prosperous, more fulfilling existence, is deeply relatable. Is it a product of being raised in a capitalist society, where happiness is always only a product away? Or is it the human condition? I suspect both, but largely the former.

It is a struggle for some of us to assimilate, to live up to the expectations of gender and social norms foisted on us from birth, and with his exquisite craft, Whitney communicates that struggle in every facial expression and nuance of body language. His highly competent figure drawing would run the risk of blandness if it weren’t for his fastidious attention to detail. Astrid Franklin’s slumped carriage, her dry, unkempt bun, her conservative, unflattering dress, the worry-lines in her forehead-all of these elements bring her character to tortured life. Whitney’s figure drawing also shines in Beat Romance, the story of academic stuffed-shirt Benjamin Winters, charged with hosting a colleague’s daughter, Cindy Lamb, a beatnik with secret. With her outsized, rebellious gestures, Cindy turns Dr. Winters’s world upside down.

As Liana Finck states in her introduction, reading stories like Return to Romance can be a unique form of psychological torture, especially for women. But as she also admits, they serve as a form of catharsis as well. Watching Astrid, Ken and others go to outlandish lengths to remake themselves is oddly comforting. Their torment is a reminder that although there is still a long way to go, and conservative lawmakers are working to have us regress, popular attitudes about gender roles really have changed dramatically since the McCarthy era.

Knowing I was intrigued by Whitney’s dark fables, a friend loaned me the first and 2nd volumes of Young Romance, collections of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s romance comics edited by Michel Gagné, and published by Fantagraphics books. I was interested to learn that Simon and Kirby basically invented the genre in an attempt to win female readers post WWII. The iconic duo churned out romance stories imbued with the urban grit of Kirby’s own Lower East Side New York upbringing, using the genre as a vehicle to tackle the complex social issues of the day, and Kirby’s buxom, pencil-waisted dames brought a measure of heat to the proceedings. But with the comics code in 1954 came an almost dizzying array of proscriptions against everything from “werewolfism” to “suggestive postures”, effectively neutering many titles across all genres.

Simon and Kirby cleaned up their act, scrubbing their romance comics of unrepentant hedonists and unhappy endings. I can’t help but wonder how much the code impacted Whitney’s work, and if he would have done things differently without the puritanical restrictions imposed on all cartoonists of the era. I also can’t help wondering how deeply influenced Whitney was by Kirby. His story “Never too Late for Love”, about Meg Foster, a homely spinster aunt who becomes the guardian of an ungrateful, money-hungry niece, only to have the object of her desire snatched away by the younger woman, is eerily similar to the plot of “Boy Crazy”, a Simon and Kirby story. This, of course, is to be expected. The real triumph of an artist working in genre is not to create something new out of whole cloth, but rather to cut and sew scraps into new and surprising garments. 

Love seems to have changed Whitney’s life. He married his wife Anne in 1958 when he was aged 40 and she was aged 42. That same year he created Herbie Popnecker, his visionary anti-hero, the fat, unloved kid who travels across time and space to lackadaisically defeat his supernatural enemies. I’m not terribly interested in separating the art from the artist-I’m desperate for road maps to life and love forged by the strangers toiling before me. One could argue that love sparked Whitney’s creativity, and that it proved his undoing. After Anne’s death in 1970, the artist descended further into darkness, dying in a mental hospital five years later.

Anyone who loves comics is no stranger to the pain lurking under its surface, the hint of madness it takes to sit in a small room for days on end while time melts and stretches like taffy. Ogden Whitney was a singular talent. He deserves our love, and I’m grateful to Nadel, Santoro and Finck for bringing that fact back to light.

Return To Romance. By Anya Davidson. The Comics Journal,  October 8, 2019.

Ogden Whitney might have remained relegated to comics obscurity if not for catching the eyes of Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro, who bonded over their mutual love of his work when they first became acquainted in 2003. It’s been their goal to put together a collection of Whitney’s romance comics ever since and Return To Romance marks the completion of the 15-year journey.

Most comics fans know of Whitney as an artist on Sandman in Detective Comics in its early days, but he also created Skyman and in the late 50s Herbie Popnecker. But the Stoneham, Massachusetts native — he was raised in Minneapolis — is being paid tribute here for his romance comics, which ran in My Romantic Adventure in the 50s and 60s.

The title story is typical of the collection. It follows Astrid, a somewhat homely, overzealous housekeeper married to glamor photographer Stan Franklin. Stan develops a repulsion for what his wife has become and goes to live out his glamor fantasies with another woman. Astrid, determined to get back what she considers hers, goes to judgemental plastic surgeon Dr. Carewe, who assures her she’s too mentally unbalanced to undergo the knife, and on top of that, she just does everything wrong. He has other means to turn things around for her.

Astrid’s journey transforms into a grandstanding Doris Day-informed sex comedy once another glamor boy is introduced, wealthy playboy Gary King, who is nearly indistinguishable from Stan Franklin. A competition for the Astrid’s affections begins once Stan gets a good look at the new and improved Astrid, and soon enough, the couples are sorted out, each man with their proper trophy wife.

You could argue that the main plot point of the title story isn’t much different than every episode of Queer Eye. The argument is that people settle into their misery and let themselves go, forget to present themselves to other people and not just let their appearance slide into a reflection of their own apathy. The Fab Five are just spreading that news that you can’t stop trying, and that’s not much different than what Dr. Carew is saying, they just say it in a kinder way.

Beyond the makeover aspect, that’s the blueprint for many of the stories in Return to Romance, which are typically epic in quality, covering in about eight pages what graphic novels now need about 200 to depict. And in those eight pages, Whitney is able to inject twists and turns brought about by fate, hubris, wandering eyes, fickle hearts, disagreeable temperaments, and a woman’s inability to live up to what a man wants — though in Whitney’s defense, there are at least a couple stories where it’s the man who can’t live up to what a woman wants.

But the scopes of the stories are remarkable. “The Red-Haired Boy and the Pug-Nosed Girl” takes the reader from childhood on through grad school and beyond as Nancy Wilson, an accomplished scientist researching radioactive isotopes, goes through life with a hatred of red-haired men because of the red-haired boy who picked on her as a kid.

“I Want a Real Man” starts with high school and follows Ken Harrison through his life, from boxing ring to a later period of disgrace. Gender role reversal becomes part of the mix here as Ken goes on his quest to reclaim his manhood, but not without bullying and abuse lobbed at him by a woman. It gives some disturbing insight to how people viewed the role of men back then, but doesn’t sway in its assertion, like all the other stories in the collection, that love conquers all.

“It’s Never Too Late to Love” is a real life-spanning work, following Meg from her self-pitying childhood well into her successful adult years when, after a number of tragedies, she adopts her orphaned niece and manages to create her own competition. This story is decades in the making, and once again presents the man as a witless, helpless trophy, a pawn in a larger game he is not privy to.

Meg’s experience is typical for many of the women in Return to Romance, in which their best attributes are always their undoing in the romance department, and we wouldn’t want any of them to remain single, would we? In “Courage and Kisses,” Jean Latimer breaks free of the shadow of her millionaire father by becoming a fearless daredevil, but of course this creates a life of loneliness for her that results in humiliation stemming from her attempt to prove her strength. “Hard-Hearted Hannah” presents scrappy Hannah Hardy, raised in poverty and using an unexpected inheritance to create a business and better herself, though she is scorned by everyone, including the narrator, for having cold business sense, which she has to dispense of for a man.

There’s not much to recommend Elsa Norton, though. In “The Guy You Love” she goes through a detailed accounting of her love life with her old friend Leona, mostly a reason to talk about Jerry Fielding, the guy with big dreams, no funds, and whole lot of bullshit. He strings Elsa along, Elsa constantly makes excuses for him. I don’t know about you, but the entire time I was reading it, I kept thinking to myself, yeah, I’ve known a few Elsa’s in my life, which made my eyes roll at the fairy tale conclusion. On one hand, Whitney is being admirable here, suggesting women shouldn’t choose partners solely on economic matters, but in the end, he has it both ways.

But it’s not always about men knowing best, and “Beat Romance” is an early work of girl power. Dr. Benjamin Winters is a stuffed shirt academic returning to America for the first time since childhood and he’s fallen victim to some scare-mongering about American teenagers. Of course he finds himself saddled with entertaining the teenage daughter of a colleague and of course all his nightmares come true. But Cindy Lamb, the daughter, is going to win this round by putting chauvanism and toxic paternalism on display.

The message in “Beat Romance” becomes strangely subversive thanks to Cindy — something about women being perfectly capable of solid achievements having to contend with men refusing to believe that’s possible and treating them like animals that need taming. But that still doesn’t mean that love doesn’t conquer all.

Margie Tucker pulls her own Cindy Lamb in “The Brainless One,” where Margie introduces herself by saying, “I’ve never been one for heavy thinking.” No worries, Margie, neither have many of the other characters in the book. Margie has her sights set on Dr. Joel Bentley, who is in town to set-up a rocket engine factory and needs a place to stay. Well, Margie can cook and she wows Bentley with that talent, but when an old flame shows up to divert Bentley, Margie has to show him what country gals are made of in order to win his heart. I believe the lesson here is that she might not have a brain, but Margie is all heart.

It’s hard to say if all readers will take away what Nadel and Santoro do from Whitney’s work, since that might require distinguishing it in thematic terms from other romance comics of the era and attaching concepts that are probably more unintended, unconscious results of the work as Whitney created them. But you don’t actually need any of that to enjoy Return to Romance. One thing that separates Whitney from a lot of romance comics of the time is that his are eminently readable, and the sprawling quality of their scopes make them mini-epics that could be Vincente Minnelli movies without a problem.

But maybe it’s Liana Finck, who wrote the Introduction, who captures it best as she cuts through the obvious dated aspects of the stories which scream sexism and gets to the center of them by proclaiming them as fairy tales from a twisted era. “I find them touching and empowering and human,” she writes. So do I. And Cindy Lamb is one of my new heroes.

 ‘Return to Romance’ is glorious melodrama.  By John Seven.  Comics Beat,  October 9, 2019.