Pappy’s Tenth Anniversary Sunday Special Number 3: The crime of love!

Realistic Romances #9 is a reprint of Complete Romance #1, published by Avon in 1949.

Avon adapted one of their own paperback novels by Harry Sinclair Drago, writing as Sinclair Drago, who is better known as an author of Western novels. He seemed familiar enough with the Prohibition-era bootleggers and bad guys to have written this potboiler under its origiinal title, Women to Love. (He was born in 1887 and died circa 1980, so he lived through the era he was writing about.)

This is a hybrid story...a romance within a crime thriller. That is if your idea of romance is an adulterous affair between the wife of a gang boss and the boss's top henchman, then a double cheat as the henchman re-starts an affair with an old girlfriend and the wife goes back to her husband. Don’t worry; it’s all easy to follow. You won’t need a scorecard.

In 1953 Avon reprinted the comic book version of Women to Love. In 1958 IW Reprints (Israel Waldman, later a publisher of Skywald) did yet another reprint. So this story got around. IW used several comics from Avon in its reprint line, including literary adaptations. One wonders if Drago knew about it. Avon didn’t usually put author’s names on adaptations, but they did this time, and IW reprinted it with the original byline.

Artwork is credited to Myron Fass, a one-time comic book artist who went on to become publisher of some of the sleaziest exploitation magazines of the 1970s. In his early days I have heard that Fass was one of those guys who paid ghosts to draw what he signed.

Posted in: Pappy Comics