Marilyn

Marilyn was a British girls romance comic published weekly by Amalgamated Press and Fleetway Publications between 19 March 1955 and 18 November 1965. It ran for between 547 and 549 issues before merging with Valentine. Creation Amalgamated Press editor Robert Lewis had launched the digest-sized Love Picture Library in 1950 and found an unexpected audience with older girls and young women. A companion volume, True Life, joined it in 1952 and was again a strong seller, and in 1955 the company decided to publish Britain's first weekly romance comic. Marilyn was a 24-page newsprint title, featuring duotone front covers (with a red overlay) and monochrome interiors. Inside it featured a mix of picture strips (both standalone and serialised stories), text stories and a smattering of features such as horoscopes and an agony aunt, in the form of Joan Courage. The comic was published every Thursday. Lewis initially drew the contributors for Marilyn from the Picture Library staff, with scripts written by the likes of Eileen Corduroy, Jim Edgar, Barbara Hale, Derek Long and Joan Whitford (who was also a hugely popular writer of Westerns for Sun, Comet and Knockout under the pen name Barry Ford), and art contributed by Joan Riley and K. M. Waterson. The comic was aimed at working class teenagers and women.