Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: Jack Kamen, Jay Disbrow, l.b. cole, Star Publications

The Torment of War in L.B. Cole's True-to-Life Romances 13, at Auction

An L.B. Cole cover with a Jay Disbrow interior story to match gives True-to-Life Romances #13 the classic Star Publications one-two punch.

True-to-Life Romances #13, published by Star Publications with a September 1952 cover date, features L.B. Cole leaning into every one of his strengths.  The versatile cover artist and publisher transforms this romance comic cover into a psychological portrait of a soldier's personal hell.  A weary G.I. crouches in a foxhole, his thoughts haunted not just by the horrors of war, but by tormented visions of the love and life he left behind.  This raw contrast is set against a backdrop of the fiery battlefield, with the lurid, almost supernatural color that only L.B. Cole could bring to a comic book cover of this era.  An overlooked comic with a cover by one of the absolute masters of cover composition in American comic book history, there's a high grade CGC VF- 7.5 Cream to off-white pages copy of True-to-Life Romances #13 (Star Publications, 1952) up for auction in the 2025 September 18 Golden Age Comics Century Showcase Auction II at Heritage Auctions.

The L.B. Cole cover of True-to-Life Romances #13 was brought to life in the feature story inside this issue by Jay Disbrow, Cole's frequent and trusted collaborator at Star Publications. In Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide #8 (1978), Disbrow recalled that his arrangement at Star 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."

As for the rest of 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.  Notably, there is also a pair of stand-out stories here from Jack Kamen reprinted from Fox Feature Syndicate comics.

True-to-Life Romances #13 might be one of L.B. Cole's most powerful romance covers. There are only 14 copies of this issue on the CGC census, with only three of those graded higher than this CGC VF- 7.5 Cream to off-white pages copy of True-to-Life Romances #13 (Star Publications, 1952) up for auction in the 2025 September 18 Golden Age Comics Century Showcase Auction II at Heritage Auctions.

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