Women Running From Houses on Comic Book Covers: Haunted Love 6 - "Sleep, My Love..."

 

Written by Joe Gill and drawn by Tom Sutton, from the October 1974 issue of Haunted Love, this Gothic romance tale set in Paris in 1906 is one of Charlton's best. A newly qualified doctor, Henri Duval, begins attending a bed-ridden elderly woman by the name of Madame Maleure at her huge, stately home where she lives with her young companion, Madeleine Beauvois. Madeleine takes care of the Madame, and it's a full time occupation, leaving her no time for herself. The doctor fixes that by getting a local nurse in to help part of the time. And now that Madeleine has a little time off, she can go out to dinner with the doctor! Strangely enough, this is exactly what Madame Maleure wanted to happen, for Madeleine and the doctor to fall in love. What sinister plot has she hatched? And where will it all end? The story has to be read to find out! Joe Gill must have been allowed a bit of extra time to work on this one, and Tom Sutton's artwork is really very nice. Sad that both of them have passed beyond the veil.

So there it is. A Charlton Gothic romance to challenge the quality of those few DC Gothic romances. Actually Charlton published more Gothic romance comics than DC, as Haunted Love ran for more issues than the combined run of those two DC titles, Sinister House of Secret Love and Dark House of Forbidden Love. These are scans from my own copy of this book, but the printing, as is often the case with Charlton comics, is a little rough, and it shows in the scans. It would be really cool if the best Charlton work was reprinted on good quality paper and in a way that preserved the details and colors of Sutton's art in these kinds of stories, and the work of others like Mike Zeck, Joe Staton, John Byrne, Steve Ditko, etc. I saw that there's a 'Best of Ditko's Charlton' set of reprints out that includes his older stuff from the 50s:

http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Suspense-Steve-Ditko-Archives/dp/1606992899/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267625615&sr=8-2

I guess it will take people like Blake Bell with enough drive to get stuff like that done.

Women Running From Houses on Comic Book Covers: Sinister House of Secret Love 3 - "Bride of the Falcon"

 

A short while back I was the recipient of a minor revelation - that the pictures on the covers of gothic romance novels almost invariably feature women running from houses. This gem of information has lurked in my consciousness since that day that I read Spectergirl's blog about gothic romances, aptly named Women Running From Houses. Now although there are not too many actual gothic romance comic books, it is nevertheless a recognized sub-genre, so I took a look to see if this same phenomenon held true for our beloved medium. Lo and behold, both of DC's gothic love titles (Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love and Sinister House of Secret Love) sport women running from houses on some but not all of their covers, although I failed to find similar conformity amongst the issues of Charlton's Haunted Love. I've chosen one example from each series to post, starting with this Alex Toth penciled treat, nicely inked by Frank Giacoia, from the March 1972 issue of Sinister House of Secret Love. Written by Golden Age artist Frank Robbins, it's 32 pages long, so I'm going to use small thumbnails.

This is a tale of a young woman looking for the love of her life. It's about Venice, a gondolier, the mysterious Isola Tranquillo, love letters and negligees, a castle, an insane facially disfigured dark-haired count with flashes of white above his ears, very long stone staircases, passionate embraces, house servants, a silent paralyzed woman apparently the count's mother, birds of prey, towers, the young woman's pet dog, medicine, completely inappropriate clothing for walking through dense woodland... but no, don't let me give it all away. Read this "Gothic mystery love story" for yourself. So as a "thank you" to Spectergirl for alerting me to this fascinating phenomenon, here's the story - enjoy!

 Note: scans courtesy of Flatterman.