Fawcett's Negro Romance 2: "Love's Decoy"

The third story in Fawcett's Negro Romance 2 is "Love's Decoy", again written by Roy Ald, with art by deservedly, but posthumously and belatedly, celebrated African American comic book artist Alvin Hollingsworth.

Of interest in this particular story is the setting - the Cafe Ebonia, a segregated, African American night club, and its line of African American chorus girls. Otherwise this is standard romance comic material, with a crooked night club owner trying to use the female protagonist to destroy the undercover cop, who ends up being the leading lady's love interest. It's great stuff! The nightclub owner typically (for this kind of story, and in some real life situations) takes multiple advantages of the young girl trying to make it in showbiz, including attempting some unsolicited sexual advances that she has to fend off.

 

 

For the sake of (almost) completeness, there's a two page text story in the comic that Out of This World is pleased to post below. The entire comic (minus of course the cover) has been submitted to the Digital Comic Museum and can be accessed here if you want to download the cbr file.

Fawcett's Negro Romance 2: "Possessed" (new scan)

Fawcett's now celebrated Negro Romance 2 was last year the subject of a History Detectives investigation by Gwen Wright, answering Washington University's Gerald Early's questions about the comic book:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/investigation/african-american-comic-book/

The video features an appearance by Sequential Crush author, Jacque Nodell, and the website also provides scans of the first story in the book. The episode, very importantly, identified the author of the book as Roy Ald, then an editor at Fawcett, and the artist as Alvin Hollingsworth. Alvin Hollingsworth was African American and, following his career in comics, went on to become a recognized representational and abstract artist and art teacher, before passing away in 2000. The particular copy used in the video had the art slightly defaced by the original owner. Presented here is a scan of "Possessed" from a different (but also coverless) copy of this rare and important book. Over the next few days the other two stories in the issue will be posted here, to mark a return to the blogosphere of Out of This World and to celebrate African American History Month 2012, which focuses on Black Women in American Culture and History. This early 1950s romance comic was written and drawn for a female African American audience, and depicts black women in the kind of romance narrative that was common to all books of that genre at that time. So here's the new scan, same story as the old scan that's out there, but without the pink colored pencil additions that adorn the book used in the History Detectives video:

Once the three stories are posted on Out of This World, the whole (coverless) comic will be submitted to the Digital Comic Museum. I'll post the link to that when it is added to the DCM archive.