Top Five Least Romantic Comics Couples

Over the years, many cartoon couples have admirably illustrated Jules Feiffer's observation, in The Great Comic Book Heroes, that "The [American] ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper's, Lil Abner's, or Superman's, was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls." Superman and Lois, Lil Abner and Daisy Mae, Krazy and Ignatz, Calvin and Susie Derkins…comics are rife with heroes who inexplicably run screaming from romantic advances, leading their lady-loves on an endless (or as long as readers are willing to put up with it) chase.

The exception is Popeye and Olive Oyl, in that the lack of mutual attraction is pretty darn explicable. I mean, she's Olive, a shrill beanpole forever plagued by obscure disorders like lunaphobia, Munchausen's lunaphobia, and leglock caused by performing ballet with insufficient training, a woman whose first words to her chosen soul mate were, "Aw, shut up, you bilge rat!" The real mystery is why Olive is hung up on a grizzled, elderly one-eyed sailor who doesn't like her and really doesn't have much going for him beyond punching ability. Although well aware of his own repulsiveness, Popeye keeps holding out for better than Olive, unwilling to accept that he lives in a crudely-drawn universe populated entirely by freaks.

Popeye and Olive cheat on each other, or attempt to, at every opportunity, with Olive once going so far as to date Popeye's even more horrible and dessicated 99-year-old father. And it's only in the Fleischer cartoons that Popeye spends any time rescuing Olive from danger; in the strip, he's usually happy to get rid of her.

They're a classic couple, sure, but in the way Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln are a classic couple: as a sort of iconic warning to the rest of us.

So who's the ideal consort to a hot teenage version of the perfect woman? How about a semi-employed beardy college professor twice her age? What is up with the pairing of Wonder Girl, onetime head of the Teen Titans and proud holder of the title Most Convoluted Origin Story in a DC Character, with the mucuous Terry Long? Instead of trying to analyze it, I'm going to recycle actual snide remarks my friends have made about guys with much younger girlfriends and insert Terry's name.

"Terry Long and Wonder Girl are like two peas in a pod, except the two sides of the pod aged at different rates."

"Their age difference won't seem so bad when Wonder Girl is 40 and Terry Long is 116."

"Hey, have we used this insult for Terry Long yet? STORK-CHASER!"

Terry is constantly trying to angle for a threesome with Starfire, and he's embarrassingly obvious about it. Star doesn't pick up on it because she's mildly retarded, but you'd think Wonder Girl would lay the smackdown. Oh, wait, she's too busy SAVING THE WORLD FROM DEATHSTROKE THE TERMINATOR to deal with her skeevy do-nothing middle-aged boyfriend's shit. Worst slacker-striver dynamic ever.

The Wonder Girl dilemma is really just an extension of the problems comic-book writers have coming up with acceptable boyfriends for Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman has never gone out with anyone remotely good except for that sexy dreadlocked adventurer guy with whom she was supposed to lose her virginity a few years ago. He was hot like Sayid on Lost, but DC chickened out and killed him off before Wonder Woman could do the deed. Even Superman gets laid sometimes, DC, and he's got that whole "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" thing to work around.

He's a genius criminal mastermind tied for Smartest Human Being in Like All History, Ever. She's the stupidest creature on planet Earth. Even stupider than the other female characters in Death Note, who are all stupid. Even stupider than other idol singers. Stupider than Starfire. I feel squicky about the idea that Light and Misa have sex for much the same reason I feel squicky when Jenny crawls into bed with Forrest near the end of the movie. Even more than massive age difference, massive IQ difference freaks me out.

Oh, right, and he's evil.

Anyway, as Death Note fans know, all the sexual tension in the series is concentrated on Light and L (and, to a far lesser degree, the inferior couple Mello and Near). Misa is just a beard. A very, very annoying, very, very stupid beard.

Still, it's almost worth putting up with their creepy/sad Brokeback engagement for that moment in the last volume where, OMG SPOILERS, Light is backed into a corner, all his intricate plans unraveling before his eyes, and he calls Misa in desperation, and she's all, "O hai I'm in a fancy hotel whee!" The look on his face is priceless. It's the look of a man who's about to get his fingers shot off because his life partner and only backup is a woman with the mind of a squirrel monkey.

I don't get why fangirls go all squee-y over this OTP. It's basically the least romantic way of pasting two characters together you can possibly construct. First they're coworkers and they can't stand each other. So far, so good; we all know what that means, because we all saw Moonlighting, or at least had the good episodes described to us. But then they get ensorcelled and mind-controlled out in the wilderness, and when they wake up they've apparently had sex, although it's never explained why and they never remember it. And—this is the important part—we don't even get a flashback so we can see the sex.

Then they still don't like each other, but Snow White gets pregnant and has like a million babies. And Wolverine thows a tantrum and skips town. And Snow White has to quit her job and move to the country to be a single mom with a Duggar-size family, which is supposed to be cute rather than my ultimate nightmare. And when they finally track down Wolverine, it turns out he's spent the whole time shacked up with a completely random woman in Alaska or something. And when he comes home, he and Snow White are suddenly totally in perfect true love and she only gets snarky about the abandonment and the other woman and leaving her to raise their million babies for, like, a panel. And then, once Wolverine is done making a speech about how great Israel's foreign policy is which explains why they've never had any trouble over there, they have a big flowery wedding. And that's the happy ending, at least for me, because that was when the great artwork stopped being enough to make me keep reading Fables.

I can see how this could be romantic if you're a nerdy teenage girl who's kinda scared of sex, and you like the idea of getting a big wedding and a bunch of cute babies without having to touch a man's pee-pee. Personally, I'm going to stick with paperback romance novels, which are equally messed up, but at least they show the big sex scene.

The incredible ending of Strangers in Paradise, WHOA ULTIMATE SPOILERS, is that David Qin, the born-again Christian Japanese yakuza scion with the Chinese name because Terry Moore did very spotty research when he was starting out, gets brain cancer, and all the female characters except Francine sleep with him so they can have his baby. First he has lots of athletic sex with whichever of the giant bodyguard twins survives to the end, because she wants to carry on his super yakuza DNA. Then Casey and Katchoo shack up with him for an extended threesome because they just like him so much they want to have a little David Qin to remember him by. Then he dies, and somebody has his baby, and all the surviving characters pair off into happy lesbian couples.

I swear this is the actual ending.

Okay, sure, this could have been romantic when I was in college and reading Heinlein unironically and I thought an extended polyamorous family of folks who are all great chums and don't have issues and agreeably die when you get tired of boffing them sounded totally workable. And of course the art's great. I just wanted to use this opportunity to warn the men out there.

SPECIAL HEALTH ADVISORY WARNING TO MEN: Do not get brain cancer in the hopes of improving your sex life. It will not cause every woman you have ever met to have an orgy with you. It will likewise not cause all these women to turn gay afterwards and have hot lesbian sex with each other. Also, your junk probably won't work anyway because of the chemo.

Also, if you are Japanese, do not give yourself a Chinese name. It just confuses people.

Thank you.

P.S. You thought I was going to mention Liz and Anthony, didn't you?

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