[BlackCat]

From high adventure in China (Young Romance 22) to the street gangs of New York (Young Romance 23) Simon & Kirby certainly knew how to provide their readership with variety as well as beautiful storytelling. 'Gang Sweetheart' contains a fairly uncompromising portrait of life in the inner city - the tenements, the poverty, the hopelessness and those either wallowing in them or seeking to escape from them. They all have their allotted part to play in this story, which also contains several fairly uncompromising scenes of violence. This made me think that the collections of Simon & Kirby romance comics which have been published in recent decades do tend to soft-pedal on the contents of these stories. 'Gang Sweetheart', for example, has not appeared in any of these collections, and that is no fault of the story itself. Given the quality of the work, it would certainly make it into my own 'personal choice' of Simon & Kirby romance stories. It is also interesting to contrast this story with 'Street Code', Kirby's brief autobiographical piece on his own inner city childhood, or with 'The Dingbats of Danger Street', another "Inner City" street gang created by Kirby in 1974. Issue 23 of 'Young Romance' also features a very good example of the photographic front cover - one which is just as good as that for issue 22, although quite different in mood and attitude. It also more closely reflects the theme of the lead story. Did Simon & Kirby have their hands in the design of these covers, or at least in the choice of images for them? I think they probably did.

Link to the book: Young Romance 023

[crashryan]

You're right, Black Cat. Simon and Kirby often built their romances into larger (and often more dramatic) stories. S&K are credited with creating the genre, but it's interesting that in the deluge of romance comics that followed, no one followed their lead. Especially after the Code went into effect, the romance itself became the center of the story and the personalities and histories of the characters were basically window dressing to make stories differ from one another. All increasingly formulaic, especially the Charlton titles.

Though there may have been others, the only attempts I remember to open up romance stories were at DC in the 70s, with serials like "20 Miles to Heartbreak" and their short-lived Gothic romances. They didn't catch on, but by then the romance genre was on its last legs anyway. Maybe earlier they would have sparked more interest.