This is Young Love #126, cover-dated July, 1977. It was the final new “traditional” romance comic published in America.

(By “traditional,” I mean: multiple short self-contained stories, no recurring characters, not a parody or homage. Charlton did a few reprints like “Soap Opera Love” a few years later, but without new material.)

It is one MASSIVELY messed-up comic book.

The cover story, “C.B. Romance,” gets in on a then-popular fad (a little late, but fine); it seems to have had a page near the end edited out.

Then we get this oddity, written by a young Tom DeFalco (the “evil way” is “passionately”—like, obviously this is a “guys who pressure you are bad news” story, but this is an odd way of putting that...)

“Love in Peril” credits its artists but not its writer, unsurprisingly. Our protagonist Betsy is in love with a race car driver, but her mother disapproves, because Betsy’s father was a test pilot who died in a plane crash...

And then Betsy accidentally wanders onto the racetrack in the middle of a race, and the driver who almost hits her is, well:

“How We Met” is a Paul Kupperberg/Ric Estrada one-pager, whose final panel explains the whole thing:

And, finally, there’s this, whose premise is not QUITE what you’d guess from its first page:

But, at the end, we do finally get to see what comes naturally to a man and a woman in love:

The letter column at the end names ten people who had won a year’s subscription to “Young Love”... but there was never another issue.

And that was the end of the road for romance comics.

(I am considering starting a Twitter account dedicated to bad boyfriends in romance comics. Maybe after the election?)