Young Romance 2

Young Romance 2 by Jack Kirby
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I knew Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created the romance comics genre in the late 1940s before I picked this up but I didn't really understand what that entailed.

This book collects stories from issues of Young Romance and Young Love. Aside from the happy endings, they remind me of EC stories with their twist of fortune near the end. Kirby's style is more refined than his work on Captain America but still rougher and rawer than his '60s Marvel work.

The stories are formulaic but, honestly, few comic stories aren't. Also, I'm not the target audience. The stories blended together after a while but they also weren't made to be read in large chunks.

The most interesting part of this for me, aside from early Kirby art and a glimpse at comics history, was how they actually restored these comics. The last page details the process. The comic pages are soaked in a solution and heated to near boiling point. Once the color floats away, the pages are dried, flattened, scanned, and recolored with a computer. Since this collection was from 2014, why didn't they just do all that in Photoshop or a similar program?

Anyway, Young Romance 2 isn't something I'll want to read again but it was a fun experience. 3 out of 5 stars.

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