Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged:

L.B. Cole's Emotionally-Charged Confessions of Love #12, at Auction

L.B. Cole creates drama for his cover of Confessions of Love #12 (Star Publications, 1952) based on the interior tale "I Couldn't Say No!"

We've talked quite a bit about the L.B. Cole strategy for his Star Publications covers:  tease one of the stories from the interior contents in a symbolic way, use bold, high-contrast imagery with a dose of sex appeal where appropriate, all colored in blazingly lurid poster art style.  Cole gave a lot of thought to cover design that would stand out on the crowded newsstands, and his cover for Confessions of Love #12 certainly does that.  Teasing the interior story "I Couldn't Say No!" from this issue, hinting at the romantic dilemma of the story inside.  Like many of Cole's romance covers for Star Publications, he captures his subject in a moment of temptation or heartbreak, and likely both.  It's a classic romance comic hook that fits with Cole's formula to combine a provocative interior title with lurid, emotionally-charged visuals that just couldn't be ignored on the newsstand.

As for the interior stories, with one important exception, these were largely from the inventory that Cole and his partner Gerhard Kramer purchased from Curtis Publishing to launch Star Publications. With the heat turning up on the comic book industry in 1948, Curtis Publishing, who published comics via their Novelty Press imprint, had found themselves getting caught up in the controversy over the industry during that period.  Best known as the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal, Curtis decided to throw in the towel on comic books by 1949, selling their titles and inventory to Star Publications.

That "important exception" was versatile writer/artist/letterer Jay Disbrow, who typically provided one new story for many Star Publication comic books, as he did for Confessions of Love #12.  In Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide #8 (1978), Disbrow recalled that this arrangement began because he had told Cole that he could develop complete stories from basic concepts. "I went into his office one day and presented him with a special recommendation that I had been saving for some time. 'Why not let me write my own scripts?' I asked him. 'After all, I've had plenty of experience at it.' The "experience" I referred to were the comic stories I had written as a teenager, but I didn't tell him that. Leonard agreed to let me try."

"He told me he had the nucleus of an idea for a story which he did not have time to develop," Disbrow explained. "The basic concept concerned a man who fell into an opening in the earth and plunged straight downward for miles. He hit bottom and was unconscious for weeks. The unknown chemistry of this subterranean world intermingled with the molecular structure of his body and caused him to turn into an enormous hairy monster. I went home and began working on the story. I took the basic skeleton of Cole's idea, filled it out, pieced it into narrative form, and typed it into a finished script. I took this back to the Star office and presented it to Leonard. lie read it and was pleased. I then pencilled, lettered, and inked the story. It appeared in Blue Bolt Weird No. 112 under the title 'The Beast From Below.' This essentially was the beginning of my short but stimulating career at Star Publications. For the next three and one half years I wrote and illustrated more than one hundred comic book stories and fillers for Star."

Somewhat unusually, Cole did not choose Disbrow's western-themed "My Intimate Holiday Affair" as the cover feature of Confessions of Love #12, choosing the more provocative "I Couldn't Say No!" which had originally appeared in Fox's racy romance line in My Secret Life #22.  This resulted in a classic Cole romance cover, and there's a beautiful high-grade CGC VF 8.0 copy of Confessions of Love #12 (Star Publications, 1952) up for auction in the 2025 June 26 – 29 Comic & Comic Art Signature Auction at Heritage Auctions.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!