Tangled Love," "Heart-Wrangler," "Ropin' in a Wild Cowpoke" and "Don't Fence Me In." The template is the one Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had established two years earlier in Young Romance — a young woman narrates her own emotional misjudgment and its consequences — but transplanted to ranches, rodeos and frontier towns, with the ranch hand and the drifter standing in for the office worker and the city boy.

The comic arrived at the absolute peak of the romance boom. By 1949–50 hundreds of romance issues were reaching the newsstands each year, and virtually every publisher was launching sub-genre variants; Avon's Western spin ran alongside near-simultaneous rivals such as Marvel's Western Life Romances and Prize's Real West Romances. Avon itself was primarily a paperback house — it had been founded in 1941 by the American News Company as a rival to Pocket Books — and its comics line carried over the pulp sensibility of its book covers. The title was short-lived, but the material had an afterlife: I. W. Publishing / Super Comics reissued Frontier Romances content under the same name in 1958, one of the many unlicensed-looking reprint packages that recycled defunct Golden Age inventory.

What gives this particular issue its outsized historical footprint is a single panel. Fredric Wertham reproduced an image from Frontier Romances #1 in the photo insert of Seduction of the Innocent (1954) under the caption describing erotic spanking in a Western comic book — one of the unattributed illustrations Wertham used to argue that comics were sexualizing children's reading. That book helped trigger the Senate juvenile-delinquency hearings and the creation of the Comics Code Authority, and Avon was among the publishers that exited comics in the aftermath. For anyone studying pre-Code romance, the mechanics of the 1950s moral panic, or Wertham's now heavily criticized use of decontextualized imagery, this obscure Western romance one-and-done is a primary document.