Number 2400: The flesh and blood ghost

Halloween is coming up in a couple of weeks so I looked for a ghost story. The splash panel of “Ghost of an Old Romance” looked promising. However, this is not the ghost of a dead person, but the other kind of ghost...the symbolic type that is alive but haunting. (Good drawing, though.)

Elaine has a good thing going with Paul, but she makes the mistake girls make in love comics: she falls back in love with her original beau, Dud. When I was in a U.S. Army artillery battery, we called a howitzer projectile that did not explode a dud. A person can be a dud, also. This dud, Dud, wants Elaine back. Elaine falls for his smooth words and slick demeanor. In a love comic girls invariably screw up a current relationship for an old one. Think, Elaine! Why did you break up with Dud in the first place? Uh-huh. I thought so. You know deep in your heart that Paul is the guy for you, and Dud will just repeat what he did to make you leave him originally.

Also, Pappy’s rules for love includes an admonition against pencil-thin mustaches. You see a guy with a meticulously trimmed mustache and you know he is trouble.

From Love Letters #11 (1951). Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr gives credit for the artwork to John Forte for pencils, and Bill Ward for inks. We get a lingerie panel in the story, which is a clue Ward worked on it.

Posted in: Pappy Comics