Romance comics is a genre of comic books that were most popular during the Golden Age of Comics. The market for comics, which had been growing rapidly throughout the 1940s, began to plummet after the end of World War II when military contracts to provide disposable reading matter to servicemen ended. This left many comic creators seeking new markets. In 1947, part of an effort to tap into new adult audiences, the romance comic genre was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby with the Crestwood Publications title Young Romance.

As World War II ended the popularity of superhero comics diminished, and in an effort to retain readers comic publishers began diversifying more than ever into such genres as war, Western, science fiction, crime, horror and romance comics. The genre took its immediate inspiration from the romance pulps; confession magazines such as True Story; radio soap operas, and newspaper comic strips that focused on love, domestic strife, and heartache, such as Rex Morgan, M.D. and Mary Worth. Teen humor comics had romantic plots before the invention of romance comics.

Simon and Kirby's Young Romance debuted in 1947. In the next 30 years, over 200 issues of the flagship romance comic would be produced.

By 1950, more than 150 romance titles were on the newsstands from publishers such as Quality Comics, Avon, Lev Gleason Publications, and National (DC Comics). More than one in four of the comic books released in the first half of that year were romance comics and a graph in Newsdealer magazine for that year showed that women aged 17-25 were reading more comic books than the males. The number of titles was too many for the market to bear; there was a collapse in the last half of1950, followed by a more sustainable revival in the years 1951-56.

Love comic books typically featured several self-contained stories per issue, narrated in the first person by the female protagonist of the story in a confessional style.

The DC Comics romance line was initially overseen by Jack Miller, who also wrote many stories. (Later, a number of female editors oversaw DC's romance line, including Zena Brody and Dorothy Woolfolk.) As author Michelle Nolan writes, "National's romance line was remarkably stable and thus must have sold consistently well. Beginning in 1952, ... the company produced Girls' Love Stories, Girls' Romances, and Secret Hearts on a bi-monthly basis through late 1957, when those three titles along with Falling in Love began to appear eight times per year.... The company picked up a fifth romance title, Heart Throbs, ... after Quality Comics left the business in 1956." By 1970, right before the romance market collapsed, DC had seven romance titles.

Fox Feature Syndicate published over two dozen love comics with 17 featuring "My" in the title—My Desire, My Secret, My Secret Affair, et al.

Charlton Comics published a wide line of romance titles, particularly after 1953 when it acquired the Fawcett Comics line, which included Sweethearts, Romantic Secrets, and Romantic Story. Sweethearts was the comics world's first monthly romance title (debuting in 1948), and Charlton continued publishing it until 1973.