I've been out of the loop for a while visiting my elderly mom out-of-state. I'm back just in time to investigate some Diary Secrets.
The cover treatment and the opening pages suggest St John wanted this to resemble a confession magazine. It's more of a girl-advice mag wrapped around a St John romance comic. The comic is the more interesting part, thanks to early Matt Baker art. But the lead text story raises intriguing questions.
Given today's sex-saturated culture it's hard to judge the writing of earlier times. Sexual matters weren't discussed openly, and I wonder if I'm reading something into "They Called Me Boy-Hater" that isn't there.
When I was a kid "boy hater," like "tomboy," was a criticism of a girl's behavior--her style, if you will. The implication was (as the story mentions) that such girls would end up "old maids," a fate worse than the Fate Worse Than Death. But then I was not the best-informed boy. I knew "queer" was a fighting word used to bait males, but I lacked further context. I never knew gay men and lesbians existed until I left home for college. So I can't judge fairly how much coded sexual discussion took place between the lines in 1950s girl's comics.
Today "They Called Me Boy-Hater" reads like a heavily-disguised warning that a girl shouldn't make her friends think she's That Way. From another angle it's a simple argument that being your true self is the best policy. When the narrator drops her boy-hating act she wins the guy of her dreams. Still there's that provocative blurb: "I was something different...something not of this world...I was just a fantastic creature." Of course the editor, not the story's anonymous author, wrote the blurb. Maybe it was she who introduced the subtext.
The stories are typical romance fare. Matt Baker is developing his GGA chops. The inking is weak, though. i'm not sure if these are Baker's own inks. I think the girl in "I Was Tired of Being Good" gets off too easily. In "Sailors Were My Weakness" it's hard to follow which sailor is which. The heroine of "Breaking Hearts Was My Hobby" does get her comeuppance, and is rewarded by being the prettiest of all the pretty girls in the book.
I was struck by the back-cover ad: an announcement that Capitol Records is launching a lyric-writing contest to discover new talent! Extensive Googling revealed that nobody--including people at the modern-day Capitol--seems to know much about the contest. I finally learned that Capitol pulled the trick twice: in 1949 (this one), with a set of three 78-RPM records, and in 1961, with an LP. The same music was used for both incarnations. Somebody finally produced a list of winners for one contest. A copyright search determined that Capitol registered the winning songs but they were never published. One contributor actually dug up one of the winning lyrics. No one knew whether the cash prizes were awarded though someone remembered having heard a commercial recording of one of the songs. The consensus is that Capitol wasn't really looking for talent. Entries had to be submitted on forms included with the albums. In those pre-Xerox, pre-recording days, it meant each individual wishing to enter the contest had to buy an album. Clever!
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Topic: Week 156 - Teen-Age Diary Secrets #4 (Read 3573 times)
