Our pal Todd Klein — you know, the guy who always wins the Best Letterer award at the Eisners — posts these great logo studies in which he discusses the fine art of designing logos for comic book covers. He's recently completed a six-part analysis of the logos on DC romance books which among other things, convinces me that one of the things that killed off that genre was that most of the logos were expertly rendered but unsightly. Not that that was the main reason love comics went away. There were at least three other more salient factors, I think
- At a time when other comics were evolving towards longer stories about recurring characters with more personality, romance comics were resisting. Most stories remained short. Most protagonists remained cardboard. And if some character did stand out, he or she was married or moving out of town within about eight pages, never to be seen again.
- At a time when mores and sexual attitudes in the nation were becoming more liberated and open, love comics — perhaps of necessity — clung to not even 1950's sensibilities but often to something from the forties. They felt to young readers like what your parents wanted you to think sex was like, which is to say there wasn't any involved in the mating process.
- Not all the time but too often, the company used lower-paid, less dynamic talent on the books. It was that old, suicidal attitude of "Hey, sales are down, let's cheapen the product." It got especially lethal when they started saving money by intermingling reprints of older stories, thereby exacerbating Salient Factor #2 above. They'd have the clothes and hair styles redrawn by rather mediocre artists…and I oughta know because I was briefly one of them. And sometimes, they'd really hip things up by replacing a reference in the dialogue to Elvis Presley with one about The Beatles. But it just made square books seem even squarer.
The logos were a problem, too. You can almost sense the indecision in them, sense that the editors weren't sure if they were aiming for the crowd that bought other kinds of comics or for the romance magazine buyers. Ultimately, they snagged neither…and romance comics went away. Todd gives us a good look at their cover identities. Here's Part One. Here's Part Two. Here's Part Three. Here's Part Four. Here's Part Five. And here's Part Six. And you might enjoy Todd's entire blog which as you might expect, does not have a fancy, personalized logo. Todd is much too popular to work for someone like Todd.