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The Confessions of Charlton's True Life Secrets, Up for Auction

Charlton liked the title and formula of its first successful romance comic True Life Secrets so much that they relaunched it as something else

Published Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:32:08 -0600

by Mark Seifert

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After entering the genre with the short-lived title Pictorial Love Stories, the series True Life Secrets became Charlton's first successful romance title. The series would be the publisher's only romance title throughout the early 1950s, until the acquisition of Fawcett's Sweethearts and Romantic Story in 1954. These and other titles followed, and Charlton became one of the giants of the romance genre, attracting material from other publishers and creators as many companies exited the genre with the advent of the Comics Code. Charlton would eventually publish some 1400 romance comics over the course of its lifespan. But its original success story in romance, True Life Secrets, would remain a fairly unique Charlton anomaly. Even as the publisher was investing heavily in the genre, the publisher killed its first and by all appearances still continuing success just a few issues into the Comics Code era. A look at the example of True Life Secrets #9 may give us some clues as to the reason why this title became something else entirely.

True Life Secrets had more mature themes than the likes of Sweethearts or Romantic Story — seemingly in keeping with the confession-style nature of the series title. The cover feature of issue #9, Older and Wiser, tells the story of a woman who left her husband to seek a more exciting life, eventually getting a job as an exotic dancer that quickly led to an arrest for drug trafficking. It seems that the beads she was instructed to pass to customers were actually narcotics. It's such a bizarrely specific little saga that the unknown writer must have pulled it from a news story. Although there are plenty of stories of nightclub dancers being used to distribute narcotics from that era, the closest I could find to this quirky tale in the correct time frame is this dancer who used a cane loaded with heroin. There are many such stories in the series that lean into the illicit confession style of the magazines of the era.

That ultimately seems to explain why Charlton chose to kill a seemingly successful comic book title rather than continue to tone it down for the code. The company launched True Life Secrets as a rather lurid confession magazine within a few months of ending the title in comics, touting it as "confessions from the headlines", which is largely what the comic seemed to have been as well. The entire comic book series is rather underappreciated from that perspective, and there are several issues up for auction in the 2024 February 29 – March 1 Golden Age Romance Featuring Fox Comics & Comic Art Showcase Auction #40258.