Time & Perspective Quote by Gil Kane

Kane’s line is the sound of an industry admitting it survives by shape-shifting. “Comics were going down for the second time” frames the medium not as a steady art form but as a business with a weak pulse, prone to periodic panics. Then comes the lifesaving jolt: “all of a sudden, came this thing.” The vagueness is telling. He’s not romanticizing romance comics; he’s describing a market correction that arrived like weather, not like inspiration. The medium didn’t reinvent itself through lofty creative breakthroughs. It followed the readers.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the superhero-first mythology that dominates comics history. Kane, a pillar of that superhero tradition, is conceding that capes were not the inevitable engine of success. For “fifteen years,” the category that moved product wasn’t power fantasies but relationship melodrama, emotional suspense, and the promise of intimacy packaged at ten cents. That duration matters: this wasn’t a fad, it was an era. Romance comics didn’t just stabilize publishers; they re-trained them to court women and girls as a mass audience and to treat everyday feeling as commercially viable narrative fuel.

Context sharpens the point. Postwar America is sorting itself out: returning soldiers, suburban ideals, anxiety about gender roles, and a booming consumer culture. Romance comics offered scripts for desire and domestic aspiration, while also smuggling in uncertainty and longing. Kane’s matter-of-fact astonishment - “they outsold everything” - is the punchline: the medium’s supposed “serious” genres were rescued by the one critics were quickest to dismiss.