Happy Valentine’s Day

I’m busy pitching woo with the one I love, so to tide you over here are a bunch of comics or semi-comics pictures celebrating love and the Holiday That Hallmark Built. Enjoy!

Lois Lane debuts with Superman in Action Comics #1 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, June 1938. Clark Kent pines for Lois but she only has eyes for the Man of Steel. And the superhero genre's psychological issues with identity and romance are off and running.

Archie Comics #3, Summer 1942, art by Harry Sahle features one of comics' classic love triangles. Will Archie choose Betty or Veronica?

Young Romance #1 (1947) by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby invented the romance genre for comics. While silly and dated now, this became a runaway hit at the time, spawning tons of imitators.

Amazing Spider-Man by Stan Lee and John Romita in the late '60s and early '70s brought a soap opera element to superhero comics perhaps like never before. Peter Parker briefly had an Archie-esque dilemma: Gwen Stacy or Mary Jane Watson?

Ralph Wiggum gives Lisa the greatest Valentine's Day card ever in the February 1993 episode of Matt Groening's The Simpsons.

The X-Men amped up the soap opera aspect even moreso, perhaps reaching its pinnacle with X-Men #30: The Wedding of Cyclops and Jean Grey by Fabian Nicieza and Andy Kubert (March 1994). It was not the first superhero wedding in comics (Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman got married in 1965) but it might have been the first superhero wedding not to be interrupted by a super-villain.

Superman finally reveals his identity to Lois Lane in The Adventures of Superman #525 by Karl Kesel and Stuart Immonen (July 1995). As you can see, she takes it pretty well. By the end of the year, the two are married, just as a similar wedding takes place on the TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

From xkcd by Randall Munroe, 2007

Archie #600 (October 2009) by Michael Uslan and Stan Goldberg answers the age-old question "Betty or Veronica?" Sorta... (It's 1 of 2 hypothetical futures now being depicted in the Life With Archie magazine.)

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