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Passage 3

Rose Saxon, the Queen of Romance Comics, was at her drawing board in the garage of her house in Bloomtown, New York.

Miss Saxon was at work on the text of a new story, which she intended to begin laying out that night after her son went to bed. It would be the lead story for the June issue of Kiss Comics. She planned to call it “The Bomb Destroyed My Marriage.” The story would be based on an article that she had read in Redbook about the humorous difficulties of being married to a nuclear physicist employed by the government at a top-secret facility in the middle of the New Mexico desert. She was not writing so much as planning out her panels, one by one, at the typewriter. Over the years, Sammy's scripts had grown no less detailed but looser; he never bothered with telling an artist what to draw. Rosa couldn't operate that way; she hated working from Sammy's scripts. She needed to have everything figured out in advance—storyboarded, they called it in Hollywood—shot by shot, as it were.

Rosa had gotten her start in comics soon after Sammy's return to the business, after the war. Upon taking over the editor's desk at Gold Star. Sammy's first move had been to clear out many of the subcompetents who littered the staff there. It was a bold and necessary step, but it left him with an acute shortage of artists, in particular of inkers.

Tommy had started kindergarten, and Rosa was just beginning to understand the true horror of her destiny, the arrant purposelessness of her life whenever her son was not around, one day when Sammy came home at lunch, harried and frantic, with an armload of Bristol board, a bottle of Higgins ink, and a bunch of 3 brushes, and begged Rosa to help him by doing what she could. She had stayed up all night with the pages—it was some dreadful Gold Star superhero strip, The Human Grenade or The Phantom Stallion—and had the job finished by the time Sammy left for work the next morning. The reign of the Queen had commenced.

Rose Saxon had emerged slowly, lending her ink brush at first only now and then, unsigned and uncredited, to a story or a cover that she would spread out on the dinette table in the kitchen.

Rosa had always had a steady hand, a strong line, a good sense of shadow. It was work done in a kind of unreflective crisis mode—whenever Sammy was in a jam or shorthanded—but after a while, she realized that she had begun to crave intensely the days when Sammy had something for her to do.

Then one night, as they lay in bed, talking in the dark, Sammy told her that her brushwork already far exceeded that of the best people he could afford to hire at lowly Gold Star. He asked her if she had ever given any thought to penciling; to layouts; to actually writing and drawing comic book stories. He explained to her that Simon and Kirby were just then having considerable success with a new kind of feature they'd cooked up, based partly on teen features like Archie and A Date with Judy and partly on the old true- romance pulps (the last of the old pulp genres to be exhumed and given new life in the comics).It was called Young Romance. It was aimed at women, and the stories it told were centered on women. Women had been neglected until now as readers of comic books; it seemed to Sammy that they might enjoy one that had actually been written and drawn by one of their own. Rosa had accepted Sammy's proposal at once, with a flush of gratitude whose power was undiminished even now.