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[personal profile] full_metal_ox
Okay; this one has been causing me a nagging itch in the brain. I recall having seen—probably on some incarnation of Scans Daily on another platform—a U.S. romance comic from the 1940’s or 1950’s that had an anthology host—something more characteristic of horror comics. He was a Zorroesque Masked Lover who narrated love stories throughout history (and may have been an immortal or time-traveler who’d personally witnessed/taken part in them); the specific story featured a girl who was concealing her blindness—which she felt made her unfit to marry.

Even after specifying romance, the sheer number of masquerade balls, highway robbers, masked vigilantes, and tragic disfigurements in the genre has made this a royal pain in the kazoo to Google.

ETA: FOUND: Jon Juan #1, with the help of [personal profile] superfangirl1 on [community profile] scans_daily, who directed me to https://comicbookplus.com/, an online archive of public domain comics; there I found Great Lover Romances #1 (Toby/Minoan, 1951)—an anthology including a story starring a character called Jon Juan: https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=41459

That, in turn, gave me the search term I needed to track down Jon Juan’s own comic (under One Shots rather than Romance):
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=1829

Shout-out as well to the helpful folks at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2023/08/habo-vintage-comic-search/#comments

Jon Juan was an immortal from Atlantis who went swashbuckling through history, dallying with history’s legendary beauties and rescuing damsels from Durance Vile, only to ride off into the sunset as wandering adventurers are wont to do; this didn’t stop him from archiving cherished memories of all his paramours (housed in his own Inner Sanctum, the Secret Archives of Love.)

The story I remembered was “Lady in the Dark”, pp. 27-35; the setting is (19th-century?) Spain, and Jon Juan is dressing and comporting himself very much as a capa y espada adventurer—but it’s the titular Lady who wears a mask/veil, to disguise her condition; the Reveal, coming abruptly from her duenna, has the air of an ableist punch line: sorry, Carmelita has a ding in her, and that’s that.

It’s easy to see what doomed Jon Juan to be a one-off experiment: Spicy Adventure is a genre that Siegel and Schomberg couldn’t do justice to under the restrictions of 1950’s US comics, and romance readers tend to want commitment as a payoff. It’s still an exercise in delightful cracktacular weirditude, much like The Continental or Korla Pandit's Adventures In Music.

And here’s the [community profile] scans_daily post, from 14 January 2011: https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/2691288.html#cutid1
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[personal profile] sholio
I was talking to a friend about this book today and realized that I am now dying to know the title/author, but I can't remember that part at all, even though I remember the book very well.

I read this book as a kid in the 80s, but I think it used to be my mother's book when she was a kid, so it was probably published somewhere in the 1950s or 60s, no later than the early 70s. It's middle-grade reading level.

The plot (which I remember in surprising detail; I really liked this book and read it a lot) was about a suburban housewife, stressed and overwhelmed with kids/husband/generally being a 1950s housewife, who snaps one day and just stops giving a damn. Her new lightness of mood makes her start floating. Her family freaks out, but she's actually pretty happy about it (mostly because she just doesn't care anymore, about them or anything else). A screwball comedy ensues in which her frantic family tries to keep her from floating away, the media shows up, etc. Eventually they do actually lose their grip on her outside, and she floats away like a runaway balloon, at which point an all-out rescue effort ensues, because she's going to eventually float high enough that she'll either asphyxiate or freeze to death. However, the book's style is still a light comedy style even when they're scrambling to try to save her life.

This is an incredibly weird book because of the style/content mismatch; I mean it's basically a funny book aimed at kids that's about a family trying to save their suicidally depressed mom. Which is one reason why I want to find it again and find out if it's actually as bizarre as I remember.

Other things I remember about the book:

- There were cute little illustrations in a cartoony lineart style. I think the cover might've been a cartoony drawing of the mom falling or floating while everyone tries to catch her.

- The book was surprisingly educational about different kinds of clouds, layers of atmosphere, and so forth. The mom was either some kind of scientist before she quit to have kids, or she was just really into it as a hobby, but she named all her kids after different kinds of clouds, and a lot of her narration as she's floating has to do with the layers of atmosphere that she's passing through and that kind of thing. This was the book that first introduced me to the jetstream (because she gets caught up in it).

- I vaguely recall that the title is one of those "does what it says on the tin" titles like you typically got with kids' books in that era, but (in keeping with the rest of the book) there may have been some sort of weird twist to it. I think it may have included "Mother" or "Mom" in the title (something like "Runaway Mom" or "The Flying Mother" except not actually either of those), but I'm not completely sure about that.

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