Love Hurts

While my favorite superheroes are pretty well-known, I've always had a soft spot for the weird, minor and exceptionally obscure comic book characters, too. There's something about those goofy little weirdos that only show up a few times that always grab my attention, and this week, as we head towards Valentine's Day, I think I have found a new favorite: Amy Ames, The Listening Heart! Amy appeared in the mid-60s in the pages of DC's Secret Hearts as an advice columnist who would sort out her readers' heartbreaks and occasionally find a few herself, and I'll be honest with you, folks, those stories are not really that great. They do, however, feature scenes where Amy just tells a bunch of teenagers that their feelings are stupid, and that is a romance comic plot I can get behind.

Valentine's Day is once again looming in the near future, which means that here at ComicsAlliance, our thoughts have turned to romance. And, since our ideas of romance have been formed pretty much entirely by comics, that means that we're also pretty fixated on the sobbing, sniffling, and weeping of utter heartbreak. If there's one thing I've learned from my love of classic romance comics -- and t

Ah, romance! As Valentine's Day lingers on the horizon, it is once again time to turn our thoughts -- and our hearts -- to love. Or at least, the truly bizarre and occasionally downright mind-boggling version of love that appears in that most dubious of genres, the Romance Comic...

Ah, romance! As Valentine's Day lingers on the horizon, it is once again time to turn our thoughts -- and our hearts -- to love. Or at least, the truly bizarre and occasionally downright mind-boggling version of love that appears in that most dubious of genres, the Romance Comic...

Ah, romance! As Valentine's Day lingers on the horizon, it is once again time to turn our thoughts -- and our hearts -- to love. Or at least, the truly bizarre and occasionally downright mind-boggling version of love that appears in that most dubious of genres, the Romance Comic...

Ah, romance! As Valentine's Day lingers on the horizon, it is once again time to turn our thoughts -- and our hearts -- to love. Or at least, the truly bizarre and occasionally downright mind-boggling version of love that appears in that most dubious of genres, the Romance Comic...

Upcoming: Ralph Wiggum, the Lisa-loving, leprechaun-seeing secondary star of The Simpsons is getting his own one-shot from Bongo Comics on February 29. Creators: Jeff Parker (Thunderbolts, Underground) recommends some conversation points new comic collaborators should consider when starting a project together...

Today is Valentine's Day, and as we've been doing all month, ComicsAlliance is celebrating this time of hearts and flowers with some of the most tragic stories of love gone wrong from the pages of Romance Comics! Today, we finish our heartbreaking retrospective with the pain of Our Love Story #24's "Joe Howard's Chick...

As we head towards Valentine's Day, ComicsAlliance is offering up a daily tribute to love, as depicted in the somewhat dubious world of Romance Comics! Today's entry: Young Romance #197's "That Strange Girl!" Hoo boy. This thing. Billed on the cover as "The Story They Dared Us To Print," this thing is drenched in as much subtext as it could get away with right from the start..

As we head towards Valentine's Day, ComicsAlliance is offering up a daily tribute to love, as depicted in the somewhat dubious world of Romance Comics! Today's entry: Our Love Story #25's "The Loves of a Model!" From 1973 Stan Lee and Don Heck bring you yet another dubious classic with the story of Bev, a beautiful young model who, according to the first page of the story, likes to sit