Heart Throbs #96

DC's long-running romance anthology delivers a genuinely unsettling love-triangle image on this 1965 issue: a smiling blonde woman named Lila looms large over the scene, her fingers working puppet strings attached to a distressed young man in a purple suit, while a tearful red-haired woman — Binnie — looks on helplessly as he confesses he can't stay away from Lila. The cover by Gene Colan wrings real dramatic tension out of the puppet metaphor, turning romantic jealousy into something almost eerie. "The Thief of Love!" promises the kind of emotionally charged storytelling that made Heart Throbs one of DC's most compelling romance titles of the era.