Daring Love #1 (1953) is a Golden Age romance comic book best known today for one landmark reason: it contains the first published artwork of Steve Ditko, the future co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. The 36-page, full-color anthology collects six standalone melodramas of mid-century courtship — Dear John, Career Girl!, Love…and Obey!, Cold Cash!, My Sister's Keeper!, and Ditko's six-page Paper Romance! The stories trade in the era's familiar tensions: a redhead struggling to write a break-up letter to her soldier sweetheart, a woman married to her career, and a small-town girl torn between a farm boy and a more sophisticated pen-pal. A slightly saucy, pre-Code cover by Bernard Baily — a hayloft scene more suggestive than anything inside — was clearly designed to move copies off the newsstand.

The comic was issued by Gillmor Magazines, one of many short-lived imprints of publisher Stanley P. Morse's Key Publications, a notoriously low-budget operation that shuffled titles, reprinted material, and changed publisher names from issue to issue. Daring Love lasted exactly one issue under this title before the numbering continued as Radiant Love #2. Ditko's contribution went almost entirely unnoticed for decades — historians only identified the story as his debut in the late 1980s, in part because of how thoroughly the title had vanished into obscurity.

Today the book is a genuine collector's curiosity. While the interior art is openly described as unpolished and the romance plots are unremarkable, Paper Romance! carries real historical weight as the earliest-cover-dated comic known to feature Ditko's work (his first drawn story, Stretching Things, appeared later in Fantastic Fears #5). For students of comics history, public-domain archivists, and Ditko completists, Daring Love #1 is a small but irreplaceable footnote at the very start of one of the medium's most important careers.