Spectacular Adventures In Romance

Romance comic books were ubiquitous for the majority of the Golden and Silver Ages, most of which were dull and lifeless. The typical story usually had two young adults working through their feelings for each other before eventually getting hitched. St. John decided to spice things up a little in 1949 with their series of Adventures In Romance whose second and final issue was renamed Spectacular Adventures for some reason. They tried to make the tired genre peppier by adding in the element of cliffhanger action, normally having white men going on global ventures in feats of derring-do. One story has an encounter in Shanghai senselessly titled China Bombshell. The main one we're looking at here is Slave Girl where the Sheik Alli-Din-Hassan purchases a honey pot blonde who was really the Lady Deborah that got captured by pirates and sold to Moorish slavers. Her lover Sir Ronald Craig tracks her down to the Sheik's harem where her shapely form is spread out over two pages. Ronald busts in as he is apprehended by some guards and forced to fight a panther which he strangles to death. The Sheik's top prostitute Zaida quickly grows fond of their new captive and tries to make out with Ronald while he is knocked out. Our hero sobers up fast after he falls out of a tower window into a moat while Zaida takes out her spite on Deborah by chaining her up and feeding her to a cobra. Ronald bursts in at the last second to have the snake bite Zaida instead, and our distressed white couple make their escape on a spirited stallion. The Sheik regrets one of his women getting away but seems more pissed over the fact that his favorite horse got horked. Raising the stakes on romance comics while mixing in danger and thrills was a novel idea, however the age of movie serials was drawing to an end at this point, so the romantic adventure bracket didn't really catch on outside of old reliable westerns.