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Snickering aside over the title of this little opus from Forbidden Worlds #78 (1959), this story is the kind that has always driven me crazy. It appears well-intentioned, but the result is not.
The message is if you aren’t beautiful, you don’t deserve to be loved. Poor Miss Purdy, she doesn’t doll herself up so she can’t attract a man or even have respect from the schoolchildren she teaches. Ah, but then an alien from Uranus arrives and he is smitten by Miss Purdy looking just the way she is! Of course, going by the values of the society from whence she comes she thinks, “If he loves me the way I look now, I should improve on my looks just for him.” It backfires in that case, and yet after that rejection Miss Purdy finds true happiness here on Earth with her students and principal by putting on a false face. Happy ending.
Sadly, it is the way of the world. We are conditioned to succumb to the charms of the phony. (Lecture over.)
The story is drawn by Ogden Whitney, and written by the editor, Richard E. Hughes, using the name Thomas R. Drew. These are new scans. I showed this story before several years ago, and made the same complaints.
Posted in: Pappy Comics
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