Teen Love Stories Ad - Warren

I wanted to run one more groovy teen-related post to finish up the week, so even though I covered Warren's very groovy Teen Love Stories mag before, I've never run this--or any--ad for it.

That's because this is the only ad I've ever seen for Teen Love Stories--appropriately, it ran in the first issue of Freak Out U.S.A. It probably would've looked a tad out of place inside, say, Blazing Combat.
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Normally I've just been running ads and related miscellany on weekends, but I've had to make a hard decision--ever since I decided to ramp up the depth and(hopefully) quality of my daily posts for the blog, it's been really hard to keep up this pace.

I'm burning through material at an alarming rate, so I've decided to forgo weekend posts for the time being, which will give me the necessary breathing space to keep up the blog at the level I want, Monday through Friday. So join us here again on Monday. Until then, stay groovy everybody!

Teen Love Stories #3 - Warren

Today we wrap up our profiling of the odd Warren series, Teen Love Stories. There was a fourth issue, but it is apparently very, very hard to find (even TwoMorrows couldn't find a copy for review for their Warren Companion book).

That happens a lot with final issues--by their very nature, they are the last whimper out the door of a series that wasn't selling well, so a lot of newsstand vendors were no doubt burying TLS behind better-selling publications. I still hold out hope I'll find it someday. The collectors life is sometimes a lonely one.

Anyway, this third issue is another collection of romance comics, advice columns, and articles on, you guessed it, romance. Although the cover is a bit disturbing, with its scary headline "A romantic warning to Hayley Mills!" Yikes!

The romance-comic portion is a story called "Truth Can Hurt" set in the world of racing. Like the previous issues, there are no credits, no periods on the end of sentences, but some nifty artwork. Just check out the excellent drafting and use of blacks and whites on this page:

That top panel could be very boring--its just a person ringing a doorbell--but I find the use of negative space, not to mention it being just a very-well-drawn hand, makes it a very attractive image. I don't know what British comics these were reprinted from, but they sure were drawn nice. Its thirty-six pages of romantic fun!

Next is a text article, called "How to Make a Boy Do Anything You Want!" (do you need a whole article to answer that?). The main thing that's disturbing about it is the sub-title:

"A woman is a woman for only one reason: a man. You're going to live your life with and for a man." Wow, we have Jim Warren to thank for Maxim! Who woulda thought?

Samantha Kirk is back with more advice for the lovelorn, and the common thread in all three of these seems to be young, almost pre-pubescent girls dating guys almost legal adults. What the hell was going on back in the 60s? In this issue, there's one letter from a girl talking about going steady with a boy since she was eleven. Eleven?? Even Ms. Kirk took the time to point out how f**ked up that was.

The creepy "Ask Chuck" column is back, but I think between this and the previous issue someone told Chuck to take it down a notch. The answers this time a lot more sensible and reasonable, i.e. boring.

Next is an article about the dangers of drinking, called "If I Don't Think He'll Think I'm Nowhere" (after #2's pot article, I guess they were trying cover all the addiction bases. Did #4 take on the dangers of...teen-age gambling??) Then we get Nurse Ellen Andrews back to answer questions about medical issues, like the one from "Miss B" in Alabama. She's sixteen, her boyfriend's twenty, and they really wanna have sex. Should they?*

There's s a prose piece called "This Time is Ours", and then the cover-threatened article on Hayley Mills, which opens with "Hayley Mills Has Been a Swinger Since Her Early Teens." Hotcha! And Lindsay Lohan thinks she knows how to party!

Finally, disappointingly, there are no wallet-size boy photos for the inside back cover this issue; I guess the editors ran out of oddly-boyish-looking thirty-five-year-olds to run pics of.

And so we come to the end (for now) of our trip down memory lane to explore one of the oddest, most obscure parts of the Warren Publishing Story--Teen Love Stories. Stay mod, everybody!

*for God's sake, no

Teen Love Stories #2 - Warren

Another very bizarre issue of Teen Love Stories, which, like Blazing Combat, was banned from sale at PX bases around the country (not really, but wouldn't that have made for a great story?).

We open with another absurdly-long British romance comic story, titled "Just Her Luck", which is uncredited and runs thirty-six pages. The art is more more of a 60s-vibe, and is actually pretty nice. Like the first issue, this story contains no periods at the end of any sentences. What, was punctuation still be rationed over there in the 60s for the war effort?

Next is an article simply called "Pot." It's very good-intentioned, and funny as hell to read. After that, Samantha Kirk is back to help you with your love problems, and then we have some horoscopes (hmm, apparently I shouldn't be so stubborn when he asks me to go to the game or go bowling. good advice).

And then after that, we have the return of everybody's favorite, way-too-happy-to-the-point-of-being-disturbing male columnist, Chuck, in "Ask Chuck." Unfortunately, since the publication of the first issue, I think Chuck got a little ahead of himself and became convinced he needed to kick his answers up a notch. What was a weird-yet-harmless advice column for girls has become a weird, Nietzsche-an foray into existentialism and self-hate:

"...sooner or later you'll hate me. Everybody does." Whoa. Chuck, want to talk about it?

What could follow that? Well, there's an article on "How to Make Your Summer Romance Last", but it just goes by in a blur as you try to recover from "Ask Chuck." Then there's yet another article, called "Shhhh!!! Things You Never Tell A Boy"--perhaps things like "I have a crush on a columnist named Chuck."

Nurse Ellen Andrews is back with her medically-oriented advice column, with helpful reverse-type headers like "LSD", "Chapped Lips", and "Shaving Legs." Then we've got our movie-and-music column, "Flicks and Discs", telling us to "pay attention to The Tremeloes. We think they're going to be of the (emphasis theirs) important groups. And they're all adorable, too!"(emphasis mine)

At the end we've got some Captain Company-esque ads, except they're all for music fan clubs and posters, not a 6 ft. Frankenstein cut-out in sight (*sigh*). And, again like last issue, we end with a bunch of wallet photos of "Boys You'd Like to Love." You know, boys like Trini Lopez (age thirty), Hans Gudegast (???), and...Terence Stamp??? Kneel before Zod, teenage girls!

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