Campus Romance #1 opens Avon's short-lived contribution to the college-set corner of the romance boom: an anthology of self-contained stories about young women navigating love, ambition and reputation on and around a university campus. The material that survives in reprint form suggests the range — a woman weighing her studies against a suitor in When She Wanted Love, a wartime marriage in I Was a War Bride, a girl driven to theft in I Stole for Love, and a piece titled The Story Behind the Cover that framed the painted cover image as a narrative in its own right. Avon shipped the book at ten cents on a bimonthly schedule under editor Sol Cohen, who ran much of the company's comics line.

What distinguishes Avon's romance titles visually is that the covers were not drawn for the comic at all. The cover of issue #2 is a reprint of the painting from Avon paperback #151, Erskine Caldwell's "Where the Girls were Different" (1948). That was a deliberate house strategy: Avon was primarily a paperback publisher — by 1953 it was selling more than twenty million books a year, in a catalogue Time characterized as westerns, whodunits and boy-meets-girl stories illustrated with cheesecake jackets — and recycling its own cover paintings onto comic racks gave a dime book the visual register of an adult paperback. The result is a comic that looks considerably more grown-up than its interior art or its ten-cent price would suggest.

The timing places the book at the exact crest of a bubble. By 1950 more than 150 romance titles were on the newsstands from Quality Comics, Avon, Lev Gleason and DC. At the height of the genre's popularity in 1949–50 there were hundreds of individual romance issues in circulation. Campus Romance lasted only a handful of them, but the material had a long afterlife: it was reprinted in Canada by Superior, recycled into Avon's own Campus Romances around 1953, and pulled into Romantic Love later still. For a reader today, that recycling chain is half the interest — a single issue of student heartbreak stories, drawn fast and cheap in 1949, kept earning its keep for the better part of a decade.