SmirkyBlog

Homage To Spidey

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:53:00 +0000

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I wouldn't really count Roy Lichtenstein as my greatest inspiration, but rather John Romita Sr. who did most of the Spiderman artwork in the late 1960s and 1970s. There was just a nice way that he framed the action and I just like the way his stuff was drawn. When you compare more contemporary comic drawing to that of the Silver Age, it's like comparing the names of football teams of the NFL to the football team names of the XFL. Contemporary comics would be named the Los Angeles Xtreme, the Memphis Maniax or the Orlando Rage. To me, contemporary comics try too hard to be over the top X-Games inspired. One has to wonder how well they will stand up to the test of time.
But anyway, as you all know, my schtick it doing political satire in comic painting form and this was my homage to Spidey. It's pretty much taken right from the panel of one of the most famous issues of Spiderman of all time. It was issue #122 (I believe, though I'm not sure) where Gwen Stacy dies at the hands of the Green Goblin. For those of you who only know the movies, Gwen Stacy was Spiderman's original love interest while Mary Jane Watson was just "a friend." At the time, all of this was quite shocking. A main character? Killed? Unthinkable! Besides, she was just so damned hot. Who didn't have Gwen Stacy fantasies?!?

Did I Happen To Mention That I'm Fully Action-Posable?

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:01:00 +0000

Once in a while I'll get a really strange idea for a painting. I was watching some kind of commercial a while back and in it they used the phrase "fully action-posable" and I thought to myself, "gee, that can be take a few ways." I then had a vision of a Barbie© saying the same sort of thing and the idea of this painting was born. I was giggling the whole time I was painting it, though that means nothing. I often giggle to myself.
As an aside to all the very hard-working and not at all meddlesome lawyers at Mattel, any similarity with actual commercially available action-posable dolls is purely coincidental and I in no way meant to infringe upon any of your so very well protected copyrights. Ditto to Britney's lawyers, though she's not quite as action-posable as she may once have been.

Jackass

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:02:00 +0000

Not that long ago I got a request from a client who really hates our current president and really loves crying girls. He told me he wanted something really "hard core." I was like "how hard core...like profanity?" He said that he didn't want profanity, but he wanted it really close. I shrugged. "All right." He took one look and said "we have ourselves a winner!" I didn't want to ask him what he'd think if Barack or Hillary won. *shrug*
I based this painting on a cover from an old Girls Romance comic from around 1970s. She's lovely, don't you think?

M-Maybe I Shouldn't Advertise That I'm A Republican

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:15:00 +0000

Ever since the election of 1980, there appears to be a significant difference in voting behavior between men and women. It turns out that women are a bit more likely to vote for Democrats. Lesson learned? If you're wanting to schmooze the chicas, and unless you're at a pro-life rally or an evangelical revival, you're best off not quoting your favorite Rush Limbaugh witticisms. Dude, if she brings up the importance of universal healthcare and you're convinced it's a Hillary Commie plot? Let it go! Just let it go!
Sometimes I try to be too cute when I'm coming up with a concept for a painting and people stare at it for a while, give up and say "I don't get it." This painting stayed in a gallery for a little too long because there were just too many people who didn't understand it. Nobody wants to buy a piece of a joke that they have to have explained to them. The potential buyer usually feels foolish because they didn't appear clever enough and try to cover for this by saying that they got it but that it just wasn't very funny. The joke here is that Melissa, our heroine, is not too keen on Brad showing off in his tie his political preferences(click on photo for bigger/easier to see version). Eventually someone saw it and got it immediately, snickered and wanted it. Now it's sitting in an office of a lobbyist for a left-wing, hell-bent-on-destroying-American-values organization in downtown Washington, DC.
The caption is a little bit of a play on Roy Lichtenstein's 1965 painting "M-Maybe" that is in the collection of the museum Ludwig in Cologne (Köln), Germany. M-Maybe Lichtenstein, in turn, used some comic book art by Tony Abruzzo as his...inspiration?

We're Through!!!

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:03:00 +0000

I actually finished this painting a while back, but with the political season upon us I think it's appropriate to let the world have a look, don't you? I must confess, I once ended a relationship because of party affiliation. Mind you, she was hot...and passionate. But honestly, she was a little bit too passionate for me. Too passionate for the other guy. After a few beers the topic turned, as it always does, to the preemptive use of military force. There was something about the way she said "nuclear proliferation" that just stuck in my craw and that was that.

I Did! I Dit Taw A Wepubwikan!

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:51:00 +0000

Once in a while I'll do something entirely for fun that has nothing to do with anything else I've been doing. Introducing Tweetie: hero of the working class and tormentor of the predatory feline, who obviously represents the cruelty, greed and mendacity of the bourgeoisie. Of course Granny represents a fatherly Marx-like character, and it's at this point that the analogy completely falls apart.

Crying Over Spilt Money

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:14:00 +0000

Sometimes you just don't know what will drive a crying girl to tears. Will it be heartbreak? Will it be tragedy? Will it be the prospect of having to forego that next pair of Manolo Blahniks? I know, life can be so cruel, can't it?
I know what else you're thinking...the colors are different. Yeah, they are. Changing the color isn't really so hard as long as you are going darker. You can just sort of, you know, cover stuff. The black is really easy to go over to. I mean black stays, well black. I was reading that deep red and magenta together was the "new hip color scheme" for 2007. So deep. So romantic. So sensual. Really, I have to stop reading Elle. Hey, back off dude! Some of the coolest ads with the coolest poses are in there. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go punch someone in order to prove my masculinity to all you haters out there.

Marron

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:30:00 +0000

So after going on about how brown was a terrible "pop" color, I go ahead and make a painting entirely in shades of brown. This one I wanted to make look a bit like an old sepia photograph. A comic book painting made to look like an old photograph...okay, it's a bit odd, I'll give you that. **shrug**
If your going to paint, especially if you paint things that people like, you're going to get asked for gifts. Just get used to it because it's inevitable. Me? I don't really mind and in most cases I'm happy to do it. Most of the times I try to personalize them a bit or make something the person would like. For wedding gifts (it's like they're disappointed if you don't make them a painting for a wedding present!), I've often done a couple kissing with a "they lived happily ever after" sort of caption at the top. This one was done as an experiment/gift. Gifts are good to experiment on. You can try something new and if it doesn't turn out absolutely perfect, well, umm, you can offer a refund? Anyway, this came out nice so I'm pretty happy with it. It's based upon a picture in an old "Girl's Love" comic and I kind of like it. Don't you?

Faucets Reloaded

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:20:00 +0000

So enough of experimenting, I wanted to get back to a painting that I had started a couple of months ago but hadn't worked on in a while. You know, you just never know which paintings are going to look really good and which ones are going to disappoint you. I started this one on a whim and based it on a tiny little corner picture I saw in an old comic book. Someone asked my to do a painting of a girl crying--but not just crying, really crying. All right. You know, the whole damsel in distress thing. I get it. So I started it thinking not much, but then the more I worked on it the more I realized just how pretty it was becoming. The colors on it really seemed to work and it just ended up being really nice to look at. That's always my goal: to create a painting that you want to look at. I'm not going for any pseudo-intellectual pompousness here and I don't think anybody is going to be "challenged." It's just nice to look at. I'm happy.

Musty Old Comics

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:51:00 +0000

Hi again. It's been about a month, but you know how these things go. But anyway, I was looking through a couple of old comic books that I have, and between sneezes brought on my my mold allergies I was noticing how faded and ratty they were looking. Then I thought, hey, that's actually kind of cool looking. As I am wont to do, I started wondering if such a thing could be reproduced on canvas. It seemed obvious what I should do, so I mixed a little bit of sepia shaded brown, some matte medium and a lot of water. The idea was that I would slowly start adding a number of very thin lowers of sepia over the painting and see if it gave the look I wanted. I used a painting that I basically wasn't all that happy with to experiment on and I'm glad that I did. I'm not hugely thrilled with the results, but it doesn't look bad. I didn't want the sepia tone to be even because discoloration of comics isn't even, so I purposefully made it a little blotchy. In retrospect this may have been a mistake. I'm still wondering how I could reproduce various stains for maybe even crinkly pages. At this point I wouldn't say the experiment is a success, but I think it still warrants looking into. If anyone has any thoughts, feel free to offer them.

The Shadow Of Roy

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:03:00 +0000

Ciao from Perugia, Italy. I was in Florence over the weekend and started musing about art. How could one not? That Botticelli really knew his way around a paint brush, didn't he? Anyway, I once received an invective in the form of email from a young woman from the art/party circuit in New York City. I was told that all I was doing was ripping off Roy Lichtenstein and that his estate ought to sue me for every penny I was worth. That was definitely worth a giggle. I don't know how many times I've been accused of ripping him off or duplicating his work or what have you. I alternate between laughing and being irritated. Not to be a geek, but it really shows a lack of knowledge of the history of comic books.
A lot of people seem to think that Lichtenstein invented non-super hero comic characters, or at least the crying girl motif. Nothing could be further from the truth. Romance comics were invented by Joe Simon and Jack "King" Kirby around 1950 in a successful attempt to expand the marketing of comics to young girls. Romance comics were around many years before before Lichtenstein started copying them. I don't use the word copying lightly, either. He literally would copy them, and some argue forcefully quite poorly. There's an entire website called Deconstructing Lichtenstein that is dedicated to finding the "real" artists behind the images made famous by Lichtenstein. In particular, they bristle at the idea that the Roy Lichtenstein foundation would have the nerve to sue anybody over the use of the images found in his paintings.
To be fair, Lichtenstein never denied copying these images. The problem is that many people who adore his work just don't know this and go around accusing artists like me of duplicating his work. And then there's the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, whose only real purpose is to sue people for the use of intellectual property that probably violated someone else's intellectual property rights.
Again, not to be a geek (though I kind of am), but I have been reading comics since I was a little kid and I have been doodling for about as long. When I like to think about my influences, I don't like to think of Lichtenstein. I like to think about John Romita Sr., who is probably most famous for drawing Silver Age Spider Man comics, as well as a number of other Marvel Comics artists of the Silver Age. People also assume that my favorite artists are also Warhol or Lichtenstein, or God-forbid Damien Hirst. Have you seen a Caravaggio up close? I hate to be cruel, but I also don't think Lichtenstein's comics are drawn/copied very well (just look at the hand of the blonde above and I promise you'll wince). So the next time you're in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and come across the wall with Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl, just know that the image was actually conceived by Tony Abruzzo and his estate ain't collecting diddly.

Ci Vediamo

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:30:00 +0000

After the overall chillyness of the last painting, I decided that I wanted to be a little warmer this time. Orange and yellow predominate, though there is a bit of cobalt in the hair. Overall they are very happy colors, which gives the crying girl a less serious tone and helps us imagine that all is not lost. At least she'll be crying up a storm without worries of her tears freezing. It's coming along nicely and I have a feeling that I'll like this one very much.
This may be my last blog entry for a while. I've decided the flee the excessive heat that we've been seeing here in Greece for a small hill town in Italy where the temperatures are significantly cooler. I may make a few sketches while there, but airline weight limits being what they are these days, I'm unable to drag along a lot of painting supplies. Besides, who am I kidding. Do I really think I'll get a lot of painting done? Still, I may include a post or two about general art observations. After all, I will be in Italy.

Faucets

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 07:05:00 +0000

I had a potential client ask me about doing a painting where the woman was really crying up a storm. All right, I'll give you something like Ashley, the infamous crying girl from American Idol.
I'm not sure what it is, but I think that women crying brings out something primal in men. I always have to bottle up the urge to try and do something whenever I see a woman crying in public because it's such a dramatic response and usually such a private thing. Are you all right? Is there something I can do? Is there some jerk you need me to beat the crap out of for you?
Of course, I also think there's something inherently funny about someone crying because of another's political preferences.

You Better Think... Think

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 17:22:00 +0000

Once again, almost done but there's still a little cleaning up that's needed. As I said in the previous post, the color scheme on this one is a little chilly and subdued, but that's not a bad thing. I also think that it's quite pretty. Notice the main two colors are the teal and the cobalt blue (blue with a very slight tinge of purple). I added a little bit of red into the flesh of the lips and nails, but only so that it doesn't look odd. I kept it toned down to keep the emphasis on the other colors.
I haven't been in a captioning mood so I'll save that for later. I can put in some text any time. Of course you are all free to participate. Go ahead! Suggest something! If you give me an idea I can work with, I'll deny that you helped me and take all the credit myself. On that you have my word.

Making the Grade

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 10:00:00 +0000

I love putting gradation of color in my paintings. When the color, especially in the background, transitions from one shade to another (in this case though light and dark teal) or from one similar color to another (yellow, through orange, to bright red), I think it makes the painting a lot more interesting to look at. It's not something you would see in older comics, except occasionally on the cover. Now that there's a lot of computer assistance in comics, especially in the colorization and printing, so you see color gradation practically in every frame.
You would think that teal (green tinged with blue, as opposed to aqua which is blue tinged with green) would generally make a fantastic color for comic paintings, but almost every attempt in the past to use it has ended in disaster. Teal's complement is scarlet and you can't do a lot with scarlet and teal, trust me. A triad that includes teal also includes magenta and orange. Teal, magenta and orange? You're just asking for trouble.
But, I'm an experimenter (some might say tinkerer) by nature and threw out all attempts at color harmony and paired teal with cobalt blue. It's a pretty chilly combination, but it works.

The End Is Nigh

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:17:00 +0000

This one is almost finished. I just need to work on the hair a little more (always a nightmare), clean up a few spots that are a little rough, and then except for the captioning, it's done. Your really lose a lot in a photograph too. The actual painting is over 42" (105cm) tall and quite nice to look at.
I'm really happy with the way the colors turned out on this one. It's warm, but a little more subdued. I toned down the lips and nails quite a bit, and went with gold jewelry instead of silver. Also, the blue background is actually quite soothing. Sometimes the colors in comic paintings can be a little jarring and either too hot or too cold. This one definitely isn't, and I'm sure it's something Goldilocks could appreciate.

Grazie Per Fumare

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:12:00 +0000

Sometimes I like to "hide" things within my paintings. You know, little things that you don't notice at first, and may never notice at all unless you really look at the painting and have some passing familiarity with American politics. In this painting I decided that she would be smoking a particular brand of cigarettes. They don't exist except in the fertile imaginations of left-wing conspiracy theorists who see Big Tobacco as a sort of puppetmaster. All righty.
Of course, I certainly wouldn't be implying anything by any of this other than what we already know: smoking is cool and women smokers are sexy. "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow."

Ojos Asi... part deux.

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 19:58:00 +0000

I went on about how brown isn't a pop enough color for me, so what did I do? I painted brown eyes. Actually, they are more the color of amber, but it's the same general thing. I remember several years ago a friend of mine, I can't remember who (Laura, maybe?), was looking at some new paints that I had bought. She said, gee, you've got some ugly colors here. I threw down the gauntlet. Pick any two colors, ANY, and I'll make a nice looking painting. She did and I did and she agreed it was a nice looking painting.
I'm going to go with a more subdued palette on this one and call it an experiment. We'll see how it works out.

Big

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 05:10:00 +0000

I like making relatively large paintings and I usually don't make them as large as I want them to be. Judy at the gallery would sometimes tell me "too big!" I don't know, to me, the whole notion of comic art screams big. I made one once that was 72" (183 cm) wide, and all I kept thinking was "gee, this would have more impact if it were bigger." You walk into a room and BOOM, "hey, that's cool!"
Additionally, except of late, I'm not particularly prolific, so I don't like to waste an effort on something that you have to stand two feet away from to look at. It's hard enough keeping the captions fresh and making a bunch of small paintings would probably lead to a lot of rehashing of the of the same old lines. Less is more. Yeah, that's right.
Oh, you might recognize that drawing on this canvas (which is stretched currently to about 48" (122cm) square. I did the smoking girl, but I was never quite perfectly happy with it. I thought it was good, but the expression didn't quite do it for me. I wanted more blasé, so instead of having the eyes looking at the viewer, I made them looking up and to the viewer's right. Bonus points for knowing what that means.

Man Flesh

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:14:00 +0000

The first time I painted a Marlboro Man, I used the same color of flesh tone that I used for my women characters (yes, I did about half a dozen women before I worked on a man). I looked at it and I thought to myself, "damn, he looks really, umm, dainty." I mean with his pink, dewey skin and his perfect complexion, he looked like he had just had a facial. Well, this is no good. I started looking around at people and I did notice that men's complexions generally tend to be a little darker. Of course a latina is likely to have darker skin than Hans the Swede, but overall, when taken from the same stock, men seem to be a little darker and a little less rosy. I toned down the flesh and it ended up looking a lot better. I'm thinking of giving this guy a slightly unshaven look. We'll see.

Super Hair

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 07:53:00 +0000

Did you ever notice anything strange about Superman's hair? I mean, other than it always stayed perfectly in place even when supervillains tried their best to muss it up. It was blue. Why blue? Except for little old ladies in Florida, nobody has blue hair. Well, back in the old days of three-color presses, you basically had your choice of red, yellow or blue, you could leave it white, you could do it all black, or you could make dot patterns (called Benday dots). Flesh, for instance, was rendered with a white background and red and yellow dots. Well, all black made it look like just a clump, while leaving some white in made it kind of look like gray hair. Red made it look like red hair and yellow, of course, looked kind of blondish.
Somewhere along the way they decided that "black" hair was best rendered with blue. It seems odd, but it works. You can still see detail in the hair, it doesn't look like a big clump of nothing and it doesn't look gray. I've noticed that these days with modern printing presses they sometimes still use blue, but they also sometimes go with brown. I guess I'm old school—and I've expressed how I feel about the use of the color brown in comic art—it's just too subdued.
I just want to know how come his hair was so amazingly super that it could survive flying through the sun without so much as getting frizzy, but it still went limp and soggy in the rain; especially, when he was at the 'almost losing" part of the battle.

Marlboro Man

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 10:23:00 +0000

I get emails all the time from people all over the world who look at my artwork. Sometimes they ask about certain pieces or they would like to know where they could see it in person. Sometimes they just want to say that they like it. Most of the times they are quite complimentary. One time--and I still don't know if it was a joke--I got one that said that the women I painted were impossibly pretty and that I was perpetuating negative stereotypes of women as helpless airheads. Ouch.
But the truth is, I'm an equal-opportunity stereotyper. The men I paint all look like the Marloboro Man, and we all know that all men are 6'3", ruggedly handsome, buffed-up and have a full head of wavy hair that always falls into place. Of course, I do love the juxtaposition of taking Mr. Virile and having him say something very 1950s Sandra Dee.

Almost Done

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:09:00 +0000

This is just a preview and I'm awaiting to see if the client likes the captioning before I proceed. I did a mock-up of the text to show what it will likely look like when I am finished. If the way I do my text and the way this text looks on screen seem very much alike, it's because they are. There's a web site, comicbookfonts.com, that sells all kinds of cool ones. I used to base my text on the way Silver Age comic text was generally done, but I found it lacked pizzazz. Study the text on a Lichtenstein, for instance, and you'll see it's actually kind of boring. I went out searching for the perfect font to base my text on and after trying a number of free fonts, I stumbled upon this site. They really do great work. This font is called "wildwords," and it's maybe the best $129 I've ever invested, though I can pretty much now do the font free-hand from memory.
The painting is not done since there's a bit of roughness here and there, and the text is a bear to put in. It requires a lot of measurement and planning and lightly sketching out. Believe me, it's a nightmare.
It turns out that the individual commissioning the painting wanted something poking fun at Democrats. Fine. I don't have a problem with that. I find your stereotypical leftist to be as a (word deleted) as your stereotypical right-winger, so I don't have a problem poking at the excesses of either party. As I wrote in my blog description, I think Republicans have inherently more comedy value. The stereotype of rich, greedy and bourgeois is a lot more easy to make fun of than the stereotype of weak-willed, overtaxing do-gooder. I mean, at heart, Democrats are thought of as well-intentioned but misguided while Republicans are thought of as pragmatic capitalists. To be philosophical, Democrats are guided by virtue while Republicans are guided by efficiency. I don't know, to me, making fun of people who are trying to be nice can come off as cruel. "Compassionate Conservatism" aside, Republicans never claimed to be nice. Is the Vice President nice? Rush Limbaugh who calls himself "The Most Dangerous Man in America" and has "talent on loan from God?" Jerry Falwell? Newt Gingrich earned his reputation as a bomb-thrower. Tom Delay's nickname was "The Hammer." Oh sure, Ronald Reagan was personable and had a nice smile, but his economic agenda was motivated by a drive for efficiency and his foreign policy was not based on a policy of politeness towards the Soviet Union.
I can get some play out of the "spineless sissies" or the "untrustworthy" angle, for Democrats, but I have to work harder.

Hair Day

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 11:18:00 +0000

If there's something that's going to drive me absolutely batty one day, it's painting hair. To look good, the lines have to be long and smooth and there has to be variation in the width of the stroke. There is no trick here. First, load up about a relatively stiff #8 brush with black paint that's been watered down to about the texture of cake batter. For this I like to use a relative new brush. Second, take a deep breath, hold it, start in an area where the line will be thin and go. Not too slow and not too fast. Go too slow and your hand will jitter, but go too fast and you'll lose control. Think of a conductor waving a wand during a relatively slow-paced sonata. Light pressure gives you a thinner line, but as you go around a bend, you apply heavier pressure and get a thicker line. I have to be wide awake but not too hopped up on java to pull it off.
You may wonder if I'm totally ADD because I've got wisps of hair all over the painting and there doesn't seem to be anything systematic about which line I choose to do next. Waiting in the wings is a sopping wet paper towel for not if, but when I screw up. I go to an area of the painting where everything else is dry and start there. When things go awry I grab the paper towel quickly and wipe. If I were to wipe when there were other wet areas near, I would start a cascade of smudges. That would seriously be no fun.
Maddening.

Ojos Asi

noreply@blogger.com (smirky) — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 16:30:00 +0000

Most of the times the eyes are the focal point of a painting so I try pretty hard to make them interesting. Traditionally, comic eyes were pretty simple. With three colors and not particularly high resolution, there wasn't a whole lot you could do other than draw them well. Newer comic books use much more sophisticated printing techniques and they are able to achieve resolutions and gradations in colors that weren't really possible before. Also, Japanese anime came along and really stylized the eyes. They not only made them bigger, they added all kinds of color gradations and glints of light. I don't draw anime eyes, but I do incorporate some of the techniques they use to make them more interesting.
For some reason this photo doesn't capture it particularly well (probably due to the flash), but the top part of the irises are a much deeper shade of blue than the bottom and there's a fairly smooth transition between the shades. This never happened in Silver Age* comics, but it gives the eyes a deep, watery translucence that i really like. The glints of white also add depth and interest.
I've been accused a number of times of preferring blue eyes to brown; that the fact that I seem to always paint blue eyes is some indication of my own personal preference. This just isn't true. The simple truth is that blue is a bright primary color that harmonizes well with other bright primary colors. Brown is more subdued and requires a different color palette. The same is true with using yellow or red for hair as opposed to brown. I've used these other colors, they just never seem to have as much impact.
*In case you were wondering, the period of the 1960s and 1970s is generally referred to as the Silver Age of comics. This is when romance comics were still quite popular and young girls were the primary market. Except for certain Japanese anime comics, the genre pretty much no longer exists.