Teen Love Stories #1 - Warren

Undoubtedly one of the weirdest publications in Warren's history, Teen Love Stories is a hodge-podge of romance comics, interviews with famous women, Midol ads, and advice columns.

Apparently, Warren got the rights to publish some British romance comics for a song and used them as the main ingredient to his very hip, very mod new publication, sure to flood the Warren coffers with tons of new cash. Obviously, it didn't quite work out that way. Jim admits in The Warren Companion that it was an attempt to cash in, no two ways about it, and it "simply didn't work."

I think Warren's intentions were perfectly sound--and he deserves praise for trying to expand his company's audience base by making a magazine purely for girls (you didn't see a lot of 11-year-old girls picking up Blazing Combat), but this magazine is so deliriously strange, seemingly put together via the time-tested "dart board" method, that if I chose to scan every odd thing in just this issue, I'd have to scan the entire thing!

So I picked the two things that jumped out at me the most. First, during the interminable comic story, "Follow Your Heart" (which runs an uncredited thirty-eight pages), comes this very odd ad, right in the middle of page eighteen:

Huh??

Anyway, after the story (which doesn't feature a period in the lot, despite the Midol ads) is an advice column with someone named Samantha Kirk, who's here to solve your love problems. Yay! Anyway, at the end of the feature comes this doozy:

Aaaaahhhh!!!! Where's Dateline NBC when you need them??

Luckily, Ms.Kirk sets her young charge straight, giving the advice: "...wait a while." Nowhere in her answer is "...and have your parents call the police."

After that, the most disturbing letters page since Batman and the Outsiders*, comes an article on fashion model Twiggy. Then another advice column, this time with registered nurse(?) Ellen Andrews. This one is more medically oriented, with questions about periods and acne. No one is issued a No-Prize.

Next is another comics feature, which looks like a newspaper strip reprinted, called "I'll Be Yours, My Love" which actually is pretty well drawn. It looks like a Neal Adams knock-off, but hey, even a Neal Adams knock-off is still pretty good. After only three pages of that is a love quiz called "Ah, But Does He Really Love You?" and then yet another advice column (jeez, young girls need a lot of advice--lather, rinse, repeat--how hard is that?), except this one is called "Ask Chuck", and, yes, it has young girls asking a weirdly smiling guy for love advice. My only comment is this sentence from one of his answers, barely taken out of context: "Let me assure you that yours is not as unique a problem as you might think. It's occurred all through history and caused some of the best murders, suicides, and vendettas."

And Frank Miller thinks he writes hard-boiled well!

As if that wasn't enough, next is a half-page anti-smoking comic strip, drawn by Frank Frazetta, (this time called "Is This Story About Your Boyfriend?") that was appearing in various Warren mags at the time. Then there are some classified ads ("Long Live the One and Only Peter of the Monkees"), and then a one-page music column ("Also, don't forget The Mothers of Invention, Jefferson Airplane, The Fugs, and Sop-With-Camel. Between them, these groups will revolutionize the musical world in the months ahead!"). Then there's a two-page for pin-ups featuring such heartthrobs as W.C.Fields, Bill Cosby, Robert Kennedy, and the Hulk.

The inside back cover features, as promised on the front, "Wallet Photos of Boys You'd Like To Love!" I like to think I have an in-depth knowledge of pop culture from before my time, so I'm sort of amazed that out of the fourteen dreamboats pictured, I only recognize Ringo, Mickey Dolenz, James Darren, and David McCallum. Peter Deuel? Bruce Scott? Yale Summers?

And to think...I have two more issues of Teen Love Stories to go!


*a free magazine to anyone who gets that joke