Miss Young America Winners as Depicted by John Romita!

Remember this call for entries for the Miss Young America contest that I posted last year? Well, today I have for you two of the winners! These lucky ladies were featured in Young Romance #140 (February/March 1966). As their prize, they were given the original sketch of themselves by none other than John Romita! Lucky indeed!

Two things struck me about this filler page. First of all, it was published in the comic horizontally -- something that wasn't too common for one reason or another. The other thing that is interesting about this page is that in 1966 when this issue was on the newsstands, there weren't any African-American characters in the DC romance comics. Yet, the presence of Lessie Williams as a winner clearly demonstrates that young women from various ethnic backgrounds were reading romance comics -- despite the fact that the genre depicted almost exclusively white characters. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited to stumble upon this page, as it reveals quite a bit about the readership of the romance comics!