As a pre-teen (and, embarrassingly, probably somewhat beyond that), I swooned over romance comics. These short, melodramatic, illustrated tales drew me in like a magnet and utterly engaged me. Stories had titles like “Love Betrayed,” “Flame in My Heart,” “Love Made Me Hate,” and “Pathway.” I still have a very small collection of them.

I was thus intrigued that author Michael Barson has anthologized some of these tear-jerking stories in a new book, Agonizing Love: The Golden Era of Romance Comics.

This story form had its heyday in the 1940s and 50s. Romance comics began to fade in the 60s (my era) and were virtually gone by the 70s, Barson notes. Since the author anthologizes but doesn’t analyze, I suppose he can be forgiven for having no idea why this story form died (“… romance comics became extinct like a dinosaur. … I don’t know why”). Seems to me, though, he should have at least advanced a theory.

On a nifty site, The Golden Age Romance Comics Archive, “proprietor” Jenny Miller asserts that romance comics died because of “changing mores, television, the Comics Code, and the decline of comics in general.” (Bless her heart, Miller has scanned dozens of these books, so you read them online.)

Miller also interestingly notes in her Very Brief History of Romance Comics that “the comics were written and drawn almost exclusively by men, and they tended to reinforce notions that a woman’s primary goal in life was to marry.” Thus, another explanation for their demise may be the women’s movement of the 1970s. Interesting, too, that it’s a man who has anthologized these comics.

Earlier this year, I lamented the demise of serialized comic strips, particularly my beloved Brenda Starr. More recently, ABC television announced it is ending two of its three daytime soap operas, “All My Children,” and “One Life to Live,” leaving a minuscule number of soaps on the airwaves.

Story forms have risen and fallen throughout history. We’re not reading much epic poetry these days. Sociological, cultural, and psychological factors undoubtedly explain why a given form catches fire in the first place and later dies out. A historical study of the rise and fall of story forms (if one hasn’t already been done) would be fascinating.