Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Dating the Federal DC's: Real Life Romance Comics

The following three Federal Comics house ads appeared in romance comics between 1983-84:

 Real Life Romance Comics [1]

Real Life Romance Comics [2]

Every Kiss...Real Life

Real Life Romance Comics [1] and [2] also appeared in a few super hero comics, typically headlining female super heroes such as Supergirl and Wonder Woman, and at least one New Teen Titans issue.

There are probably other romance comics house ads. I haven't reviewed my romance comics collection in this regard - these samples are from one-off titles such as Romance Time, Destination Paradise, Follow Your Heart, Last Kiss and Gift of Love. 

I expect a review of such ads in romance comics may provide some guidance to the publication dates of those titles, but it may depend on how many such varieties there are - the more the better.

At this stage I'm not sure how reliable they are as a guide to dating the super hero titles they appear in. There is some degree of genre cross-promotion in the first year of Federal Comics - there are a few instances of super hero titles pairing a Superman or Batman ad with a romance or western ad on an inner cover. But I don't have enough samples and data at the moment to confidently assess whether such pairings were across the board on all titles for a given month, or selectively weighted towards series such as Supergirl and Wonder Woman.

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