A sordid story of love, lust, and larceny...
...that was so multi-genre, we ran it in four different blogs!
Part 1 was at Crime & Punishment™
Part 2 was at True Love Comics Tales™
Part 3 was at Seduction of the Innocent™
So go and read those posts (if you haven't already), then continue here...
Don't ya just love a happy ending?
The comic book version appeared in Avon's Complete Romance #1 (1949)
...the one-shot Avon Realistic Reprint Women to Love (1953)...
...and IW/Super Comics' Realistic Romances #9 (1958)...with a totally-unrelated cover.
Why did Avon Comics do this particular book?
Because their parent company, Avon Books had the rights to the novel!
(The book's cover is at the top of this post.)
Illustrator Myron Fass became something of a legend in the comics industry...but not as an illustrator.
After the near-death of the comics industry in the mid-1950s, he talked William Harris (inventor of the web printing press) into financing a line of magazines including girlie, news tabloid, and one of the first b/w monster magazines, Shock Tales.
In the 1960s, Harris' son Stanley became Myron's partner, and the magazine line continued, adding a short-lived line of comic books, MF Publications, in the mid-1960s which included the second Captain Marvel and more horror magazines under the imprint Eerie Publications.
After Stanley Harris and Fass had a falling-out in the aerly 1970s, Harris founded Harris Publications, which bought out Warren Publications and continued their line of b/w horror titles as both magazines and color comics!
Meanwhile, Fass continued publishing literally anything that could make a buck including one-shot magazines about history, disasters, scandals, the paranormal, celebrities, etc, at one point publishing almost 1/4 of the total number of newsstand magazines available in the USA!