A hardback of mid-century romance comics reprinted exactly as printed, from when a woman sobbing that her boyfriend is “mixed up with Communists” was nobody’s idea of a joke.

Weird Love: You Know You Want It! is the first of six volumes Craig Yoe and Clizia Gussoni assembled for IDW’s Yoe Books — 160 pages collecting the first three issues of their Weird Love comic, plus a gallery of covers. Nothing is redrawn or re-lettered. The halftone dots and the off-register red are still in there.

The anthology exists because the material is free. Most of it comes from publishers that folded without renewing their copyrights: Love Secrets (Quality), Love Diary and Just Married (Charlton), Romantic Adventures (ACG), Dear Lonely Hearts (Comic Media), Best Romance (Pines). Yoe is reprinting an industry’s discards, and the discards run into the 1970s, not just the fifties.

That panel is page five of “I Fell for a Commie,” from Love Secrets #32, August 1953. Gladys Lynn tails a friend to something called the Young Americans Club, reads the noticeboard — LENIN AND SOVIET RUSSIA, STALIN WANTS PEACE — and concludes that her vanished boyfriend Tom has gone red. He turns out to be an FBI agent who joined the club to collect evidence. The story signs off: “heed my lesson well! For you might be less fortunate should you be tempted by love to travel along Communism’s evil byways!”

None of this was a sideline. By 1950 more than 150 romance titles were on the newsstands, and better than one in four comics published in the first half of that year was one — a genre Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had invented three years earlier with Young Romance. The 1954 Comics Code then sanded the edges off, pushing publishers into blander, more dutifully domestic stories. The Commie story predates the Code, which is why it still has any edge to sand.

Two honest notes. The find credited these scripts “largely” to Joe Gill, following IDW’s own billing; Gill really was Charlton’s house writer for thirty years, but the Quality, ACG, Comic Media and Pines stories are not his, and most Golden Age romance ran unsigned. And the book documents attitudes rather than endorsing them — the casual contempt for women is precisely what curdles the stories into comedy. It was $24.99 new and is no longer stocked as such; secondhand hardbacks run roughly $26 to $50.