I love how sixties psychedelia made its mark on mainstream culture, from record sleeves to fashion, posters to TV ads, film to fiction, everyone flirted with the imagery to appear hip for a minute or two. Comics were no exception, with underground comix forming a good slice of the movement’s attitude. Mainstream comics weren’t immune either and the teen fashion and romance issues of the era show that the writers and artists were plugged into the fashions of the day. Hippies or beatniks were usually the bad boys though – along with, and sometimes interchangeable with – bikers and crimminals, not something nice girls got involved with. A common plot thread would have the female lead’s head turned, under the spell of a travelling hipster or ‘swinger’ and led down the wrong path to the point where a former, spurned love would step in and take her back to normality. Marriage was never far from the lead character’s mind and most of the bad boys wanted free love and not to be tied down by the ‘squares’ or the ‘straights’. Here’s the first of a collection of covers that showcase the styles and subject matter of the counterculture from a huge online archive of teen romance comics of the era.

Occasionally the script would be flipped whereby the female lead would throw themselves whole-heartedly into the action, only to see the error of her ways later when things hot up and she’s shown the error of her ways by a ‘sensible’ man, the sexism of these stories unfortunately shines brightly from nearly every story.