Steve Darnall is flipping through Girls’ Love Stories, a romance comic book from the mid-60s. “Look at this!” he says, pointing to a scene in which a young woman is being interviewed by a potential employer who sternly tells her that women usually fail in business because they quit to get married. Convincing him that her career comes first, she gets the job and then, of course, ends up falling in love. In the final scene, the woman, out of a job, snuggling tearfully in the arms of a handsome junior executive, sobs, “Oh, darling! You’re right. The real failure is losing you.”
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That’s the attitude Darnall takes as he combs them for ideas for his own book, a darkly funny send-up of romance comics called Empty Love Stories. An annual publication–though a year and a half passed between issues one and two, the second released in August–Empty Love Stories looks and reads a lot like romance comic books, a genre from the 50s and 60s that was killed off by superheroes. Darnall’s protagonists are always lonely people, mostly women, who look for love in all the wrong places–and find it. They imitate the genre’s syrupy dialogue, and their stories are narrated in the same breathless prose.
“White Trash Romance” tells the story of a woman who’s abused by her husband–mocking the genre’s sentimentalized masochism: “When Bobby threw that punch, I knew he was saying the words that he was normally too inarticulate to say…I knew, in his own way, he was saying ‘I love you.’” The story ends with the stereotypical romantic reconciliation, the woman hanging on the man, tears streaming from her eyes as she thinks, “Oh, Bobby–you’re the best cousin a girl could ask for!”
Darnall will be signing copies of Empty Love Stories and discussing his work Wednesday at 7:30 at Barbara’s Bookstore, 1350 N. Wells. Call 312-642-5044.
