THE DREAM BOOK OF LOVE No. 3 (OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 1954)

When I was a kid, my sister would read this kind of comic book whenever she wasn't reading (and re-reading, and re-re-reading) Walter Farley's Black Stallion books. This was, I believe, the standard regiment for young girls in the Fifties.  I tried to read one of her comics books once.  No cowboys.  No Indians.  No monsters.  No superheroes.  Not even any funny talking animals!  Just a bunch of kissy stuff with girls in fanciful than they should have been able to afford clothes and handsome guys who end up being tamed by aforesaid girls.  This was certainly not my idea of a decent comic book.  And still they charged ten cents.  Ten cents for this crap!  Girls.  I couldn't figure them out.  (Still can't.)

This might actually have been a comic book that my sister had.  I wouldn't put it past her.

Girls back then were much different from girls now.  They had a subservient role.  Keep the house clean, cook the yummy meals for hubby, keep up the good looks, pop out a buncha babies, have no independent thoughts.  In other words, girls were expected to grow up and be Stepford wives.  It was a very unenlightened time.

That was the perception of the Fifties.  All too often, perception and reality merge.

Anyway, we have this romance comic with a photographed cover featuring May Wynn and Robert Francis in The Caine Mutiny.  What that has to do with what's inside the book I'll never know.  Robert Francis has a slack-jawed idiot gaze that makes me wonder who wiped the drool from his mouth before the photo was taken.  May Wynn is staring desperately off to the side as if to say, "What am I doing with this jamook?"  The did little to inspire me to go further.

But further go I did.  There were four stories:

• "I Was a Pick-Up Girl"
• "He Was Going  to Marry My Best Friend!"
• Mister Cupid, and 
• Was I Too Good?

If that was enough estrogen-ladened angst, there was also an advice column by someone going under the name of "Crystal Ball."  Mr./Ms. Ball specialized in interpreting dreams.

So let's travel back to the good ol' days of the mid-Fifties when men were men and women were stereotyped.

Enjoy.  Maybe.

http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=50993