Vintage Paper is about old comics and more: whether you're interested in the Platinum Age, the Golden Age, the Silver, Bronze, or Copper Ages — or the history behind it all — Bleeding Cool has you covered on that. Featuring articles and research from some of the best experts in the field for comics, pulps, dime novels, and much more.
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 […]
Long considered one of the most notorious publishers in comic book history, Victor Fox was seemingly a desperate man by 1947. With the superhero genre well into its post-War decline, in August 1946, remaining Fox flagships Blue Beetle and Green Mask were halted, and Fox's rising tide of funny animal and other humor titles completely took over […]
St. John was over a year away from its true beginnings in romance comics books when it got into the market with Treasury of Comics and Comics Review, but Treasury of Comics #1 featuring Abbie an' Slats could be viewed as a stealth entry into the genre for what comic book history now remembers as […]
Romantic Hearts was a romance anthology comic, first published by Story Comics from 1951 to 1953 and then taken over and relaunched by Master Comics from 1953 to 1955 before it closed. Up for auction from Heritage Art Auctions is the first issue from the first run of Romantic Hearts #1. Experiment with Love is […]
1952 was a year that helped make Marilyn Monroe an icon. Early that year, she began a romance with New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio. In March, with her studio film career taking off, photos taken of her for a nude calendar in 1949 became public knowledge, and she leaned into the scandal by admitting to […]
Hitting newsstands in January 1951, the title of the Ziff-Davis Cinderella Love series was likely inspired by the success of Disney's Cinderella throughout 1950. The now-legendary animated classic also prompted a wave of Cinderella-themed consumer goods and created the kind of phenomenon that had people attempting to insert the concept of Cinderella into cultural conversations […]
The late 1940s to early 1950s were a boom time for giant comics from several different publishers. Some publishers like St. John had an entire line of rebound remainder giant-size comics with new covers, while Fawcett's giants were a mix of reprints and new material. Farrell's giant Voodoo Annual #1 is a highly collected 100-page […]
Best remembered for what is arguably the most notorious comic book title in American comic book history, Crime Does Not Pay, publisher Lev Gleason also put out material ranging from superhero titles like Daredevil to romance comics like Lovers' Lane. Gleason started his career in 1931 with Open Road for Boys magazine before moving on […]
Legendary comic book artist John Buscema began his career in the late 1940s, significantly shaping the landscape of Marvel Comics during its pivotal growth in the 1960s and 1970s. He initially pursued a career in commercial illustration after graduating from Manhattan's High School of Music and Art and taking courses at Pratt Institute and the […]
Comic book genres have sometimes risen to prominence on the success of a single title, and such was the case for romance comic books with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's Young Romance in 1947. When Time Magazine covered the romance comic book boom in 1949, it was already citing Young Romance as the originator of […]
The Korean War era combined with the post-WWII concerns of the Cold War to transform war comic books into their own distinct genre that lasted for decades, and like other genres, war comics often had specific themes. For example, the nature of war and the impact of service on relationships made for natural romance-war genre […]
Dear Lonely Heart #1, from Artful/Comic Media, was published in 1951, and features a pretty cool cover that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside when you see it. It is also a rare book. While this raw copy, taking bids right now at Heritage Auctions, is at $36, it might go much […]
Legendary comic book creator Wally Wood is known for a wide variety of work including EC Comics material, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and Marvel's Daredevil, but his got his first assignments in the comic book field with Victor Fox's romance comic book line. He told Comics Buyers Guide in 1981, "The first professional job was lettering for […]
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby may be best known for creating the patriotic political superhero with Captain America, espousing military intervention in a foreign country at a time when US politics favoured isolationism, and Nazis held rallies in New York. But after the war, they also invented the American romance comic, the success of which […]
Best remembered for his creation of Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt at Charlton, the versatile and prolific Pete Morosi's career ranged from the 1940s through the 1980s and included virtually every comic book genre. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1948-1950, Morosi worked for a wide range of publishers throughout the early 1950s, including Fox, Marvel […]
"ACG's brief flirtation with grim, sensationalistic stories remains one of the great mysteries of comic book history," noted Michelle Nolan in her indispensable Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics. We've already covered two of the issues from that "brief flirtation", Romantic Adventures #49 and #50, and Confessions of the Lovelorn #52 […]
Throughout its brief lifespan, Allen Hardy Associates repeatedly asked for "the unusual" in the comic book market columns of magazines like Writer's Digest and Author & Journalist. The blurb sometimes further elaborated that the publisher wanted, "Artists and writers who don't have a hackneyed approach to comics." Better known today as Comic Media, Allen Hardy […]
Youthful Hearts publisher Pix-Parade and its most closely associated company Youthful Magazines were both part of a larger constellation of publishing companies with loose connections to DC Comics founder Harry Donenfeld. One principal of the company, William K. Friedman, had acted as Donenfeld's lawyer on numerous occasions, while another, Adrian Lopez, had previously co-founded a […]
Bill Ward's cover for Broadway Romances #1 is one of the best romance covers Quality Comics published during its 1949-1956 romance era. Best remembered for his character Torchy, Ward was well suited for the romance genre, during this period likely worked on at least 200 comic books at Quality, at least half of those romance. […]
Dell Publishing is American comic book history's most important publisher of comic books licensed from television, film, and other media. In partnership with Western Printing & Lithography and on their own, the company published an enormous volume of licensed material ranging from Disney comic books to comics based on comic strips, movies and television shows. […]