Beschreibung:

VG+ (4.5). Cover miscut with excess white margin at bottom edge, some lettering loss at top edge, and poor staple placement (top staple is 1/4" from spine edge and bottom staple is 1/8" from spine edge), faint center crease, two 1/4" tears to edges of covers and a few small nicks, top spine lightly bumped, penciled distributor's mark ("B1/25") to "R" in "ROMANCES." Off-white pages. Cover: Matt Baker Art: Matt Baker (10 pages), Ric Estrada, uncredited others. CGC Census: Ten slabbed copies, the highest grades being two 5.0's. GPAnalysis: Only two reported sales in any grade: A 3.0 sold for $100 in 2017, and a 4.5 sold for $360 in March 2019. In Matt Baker's "We Married in Haste," An impetuous gal runs off and gets a quickie marriage to a soldier after her fiancé annoys her. Despite her shenanigans it all works out in the end, as our heroine eagerly anticipates "the stork [that] will soon bring us a little bundle from Heaven!" Wartime Romances is a curious mag, combining a military-friendly editorial perspective with a pro-nuclear family viewpoint in which sexual transgressions are punished, while couples embracing traditional domestic roles are rewarded. A telltale whiff of propaganda seems to hang over these stories, and no wonder: during WWII, publisher Archer St. John, who was not draft-eligible due to his age and marital status, volunteered to aid the war effort by spotting enemy aircraft, and shortly thereafter, he took a position with the Office of War Information (OWI). The OWI, of course, was an important U.S. government propaganda agency. One wonders — how did St. John's background as a propagandist affect his comics output? St. John's pre-Code horror output is among the tamest of the era — perhaps Archer St. John's personal experience with comics as a tool for influencing behavior led him to be more judicious about the content of his horror mags? Recent comics scholarship alleges that during WWII, comics publishers and Uncle Sam worked clandestinely to advance a pro-U.S. agenda, and that this relationship was still in place to a lesser degree during the Korean War. If one considers WWII comics as an unofficial propaganda arm of the American war effort, then it's tempting to view the pre-Code horror era as a sort of fracture to this relationship. It's as if the violent energies that publishers unleashed in order to promote wartime enthusiasm could no longer be contained, and spilled over into the anarchic, unruly, antisocial excesses of the horror comics craze. Considered in this light, the government response (in the form of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency) seems like a case of Uncle Sam trying to put the comic book genie back in the bottle. See Ken Quattro's April 26, 2021 comicsdetective.com blog entry for more on Archer St. John's involvement with the OWI. Consignments welcome for PBA's Fall 2022 Comic Book sale. Pre-Code Horror, Golden Age and Silver Age comics, original art, vintage comic-related photos and ephemera sought. Send inquiries to [email protected] . A limited edition of 100 softcover and 6 hardcover catalogues are available. 140 pages, fully illustrated. Fun reference, great keepsake. Softcovers $40, dust-jacketed hardcover with limitation plate $200. To order, contact [email protected] .