Golden/early Silver Age romance comic with a masked host? (FOUND: Jon Juan #1)
Okay; this one has been causing me a nagging itch in the brain. I recall having seen-probably on some incarnation of Scans Daily on another platform-a U.S. romance comic from the 1940’s or 1950’s that had an anthology host-something more characteristic of horror comics. He was a Zorroesque Masked Lover who narrated love stories throughout history (and may have been an immortal or time-traveler who’d personally witnessed/taken part in them); the specific story featured a girl who was concealing her blindness-which she felt made her unfit to marry.
Even after specifying romance, the sheer number of masquerade balls, highway robbers, masked vigilantes, and tragic disfigurements in the genre has made this a royal pain in the kazoo to Google.
ETA: FOUND: Jon Juan#1, with the help of superfangirl1 on scans_daily, who directed me to https://comicbookplus.com/, an online archive of public domain comics; there I found Great Lover Romances #1 (Toby/Minoan, 1951)-an anthology including a story starring a character called Jon Juan: https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=41459
That, in turn, gave me the search term I needed to track down Jon Juan’s own comic (under One Shots rather than Romance):
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=1829
Shout-out as well to the helpful folks at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2023/08/habo-vintage-comic-search/#comments
Jon Juan was an immortal from Atlantis who went swashbuckling through history, dallying with history’s legendary beauties and rescuing damsels from Durance Vile, only to ride off into the sunset as wandering adventurers are wont to do; this didn’t stop him from archiving cherished memories of all his paramours (housed in his own Inner Sanctum, the Secret Archives of Love.)
The story I remembered was “Lady in the Dark”, pp. 27-35; the setting is (19th-century?) Spain, and Jon Juan is dressing and comporting himself very much as a capa y espada adventurer-but it’s the titular Lady who wears a mask/veil, to disguise her condition; the Reveal, coming abruptly from her duenna, has the air of an ableist punch line: sorry, Carmelita has a ding in her, and that’s that.
It’s easy to see what doomed Jon Juan to be a one-off experiment: Spicy Adventure is a genre that Siegel and Schomberg couldn’t do justice to under the restrictions of 1950’s US comics, and romance readers tend to want commitment as a payoff. It’s still an exercise in delightful cracktacular weirditude.
And here’s the Scans_Daily post, from 14 January 2011: https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/2691288.html#cutid1