Return to Romance: The Strange Love Stories of Ogden Whitney

From 2019, The New York Review of Books revived the off-kilter charm of 1950s romance comics with this single-issue collection spotlighting writer Richard Hughes and artist Ogden Whitney. The volume gathers Whitney's strange, deadpan love stories—tales where gothic melodrama meets suburban anxiety, rendered in his clean, unnerving style. It matters as a rediscovery of a singular, slyly subversive voice in mid-century comics, proving that even the most formulaic genre could yield genuinely weird art.