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Olivia Waite
Geeky romance novelist here. 🙂 As far as I know, romance novels’ distinctive clinch covers (the wind-in-the-hair, half-naked embraces) were designed to sell not to the reader, but to the (usually male) purchasing agent for a book distributor. Over time these images became a code, so that now even modern self-published authors (who don’t have the same distribution bottleneck) use gowns and hair and half-naked embraces so the reader can recognize the story as a romance. I don’t know as much about romance conics, but it seems to me that the covers focus on a dramatic point in the story more than on implied sex — story is much more likely to be a selling point to the reader, who is much more personally invested in the contents of a book than a distributor is.
There’s probably also something to be sald for the different marketing strategies at play in the 30s, 40s, and 50s (for romance comics) and the 60s, 70s, 80s, and on (when romance novels came into their own).