Teen-Age Romances 34 / Mama Told Me Not to Come

A treat today for Matt Baker fans



The indicia are superfaded on the ifc, and the back cover has a little water damage, but the inside pages were pretty nice. I did a lot of work on the cover but didn't have a decent image to work from, so I hope I got the colors ballpark.

I like the racy cover with the short-haired tattler. The hinting and teasing covers don't always match the story in the St. John romances, but this one does. The comic leads with an extended Baker piece "Asking for Trouble" about an orphan from NY who comes to live with her older brother and wife in a small town. You know the girl’s a handful when her first question regards the boys about town…



She puts up a nice girl front but is a devious one with a game plan for taking down her rivals and getting the guys interested in her. She’d even fake interest in hot rods, why the little schemer…



Before you know it, she’s lured all the cool kids from school into wild parties and vice, oh my!



Things get wilder as she meets a pushy older man, imbibes hard booze, and the school discovers what’s been going on.



Read and discover our vixen’s fate.

The second story is a Cal Massey story "My Other Self," and the comic rounds out with "They Called Me Teacher's Pet."



I’m amazed at how often the student/teacher romance crops up in these golden age titles. I guess it makes for some nice scandal, but I think it’s probably more about wish fulfillment for the young girl readers. Amazingly, most of these stories have happy endings, whereas I’d think more often this sort of thing might lead to the courtroom, heh heh.

John Benson (largely from Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr.’s identification) put together a nice index for his books on St. John Romance and Dana Dutch that Fantagraphics hosts here:

http://www.fantagraphics.com/downloads/

The index identifies the artists for the last story as Mikes Sekowsky and Peppe. Benson also believes the Baker story and the text piece "More Luck Than I Deserved" to have been written by Dana Dutch the subject for much of his excellent book Confessions, Romances, Secrets and Temptations: Archer St. John and the St. John Romance Comics which also has a nice timeline of all St. John comics listed by month. Another must have for Baker aficionados is Alter Ego (a great mag) issue 47 which is jam-packed full of information on the enigmatic Baker.

Cheers,

Darwin

Get the full hi-res scan here.

John Wayne: A Man's Man? - Gay 006 (1970-02-16)

Ok, on impulse I'm following up my last post of new scans with an older scan just because I think the cover is in a similar vein to the cover on Ink 23

I got this paper being unsure of its contents except for this wonderful cover:


Get the full hi-res scan here.

I know, I know, I'm an irreverent bastard. But Rooster Cogburn's big mug above the teaser "John Wayne: A Man's Man?" is just too good to resist. A few people have pointed out his name is Marion, so maybe he had a little of the Boy Named Sue thing going for him.

My first impression was that this was going to be mostly a sex newspaper along the lines of Screw (from the warning box on the cover), but really this paper is not very much different from most of these I've been scanning. Mainly it seems like a paper catering to the gay community of New York. I know EVO had a paper called Gay Power and surely there were others as well. There are a couple nudes in here (as in all of these underground papers) but I certainly wouldn't call it simply a smut paper.
A look at the news page reveals a concern with an emerging gay rights movement and a variety of politcal interests:



Also in this issue: The editors on steamroom harassment and the poor quality of gay films, Mardi Gras 1970, gay cops, growing up gay in the bible belt, the pentagon procurers, psychiatrists: witch doctors of the 20th century, british theatre, poetry, wanton ads, and more.

The John Wayne article:



Which it turns out is not so much an exploration of John Wayne's sex life but an examination as his role as cultural icon. What is the masculine ideal John Wayne projects, and where does that leave homosexuals. Certainly the duke carries much weight in the icon department as groups like Public Enemy have referenced his role in the dominant culture. I'd also note here, I love John Wayne movies and will watch them til the day i die.

Enjoy!

Darwin

Oz 31 / Ink 23 – A peek at the UK Underground

Yikes! I've been scanning my butt off but typing not at all, so howsabout a double post tonight of UK undergrounds. I did a scan a little while back of IT, but tonight I’m serving up examples of a couple of other magazines thanks to my main man on the other side Slinky. First up Oz 31. The cover is classic:



I scanned a Berkeley Tribe recently with a similar man, woman, baby, gun thing going, but this one is a cheeky take on the revolution. The caption says

He drives a Maserati
She’s a professional model
The boy is the son of the
Art Editor of Time Magazine:
Some Revolution!

I’d hoped to see an issue of Oz for some time now, and I was not dissappointed with what I’ve found. The issue is packed with art and oddities and printed in a wide array of colors. It’s really something of a graphical explosion. Full of all sorts of naughty and amateurish bits, there’s also some striking graphics.

Perhaps Charles Acid has something to do with the colorful sensibility. A funny take on the goofy ads from the comics of youth:



Here’s a colorful spread so you can see what I mean, you’ll can get a much closer look when in the full scan:



or this piece, too, is just all over the place, only in one color but complex, from the article on magic mushrooms…




The background is full of all sorts of detail images blending into each other in shades of orange. A nature sketch of the mushroom Fly Agaric hovers over a long haired with ride a sort of phallus broom beneath a faun and maiden perched on mushroom pedestals which are growing from the eyes of a frog that is blending into Alice’s caterpillar smoking from a hooka being descended upon by a parade of fairies, aliens, and stools all floating over a castle with phallic towers growing from toadstools with human faces that stand above cockroach and another frog with stools for eyes. Not too shabby for a background illustration!

I love this bit probably reprinted from EVO, Yossarian’s tease of the obscene caller:



Or I thought this was a funny title for the Dylan story:



Really a fun magazine, graphically brilliant but not as political as IT or Ink which the cover above proclaims is coming. Apparently there was a web archive of Oz material but it seems to have been taken down. You can navigate to the page and still see the covers at least from a link at the bottom of this wiki on the UK Underground:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_underground

or there is also a list of UK underground pubs at the wiki for the underground press, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press#The_underground_press_in_the_UK

Ink reminds me more of most of the U.S. papers at this time, moving away from aesthetics and lifestyle into mostly political issues. Issue 23 is from December of 1971 and features a Warhol-esque examination of Che as icon.



Inside is an article on the Gay Liberation Front. Sample:



Click the links below to get the cover to cover scans, enjoy! And thanks once again to Slinky for the raws.

Oz 31 (1970-11) (SlinkyDarwin-DREGS)

Ink 023 (1971-12-03) (Slinkynation-Dregs)

Prison Break 03 (1952 Realistic) / Bad Girl Bad Girl Whatcha Gonna Do?

Well, well, well, a real treat from the golden age this weekend, Prison Break! 03 from Avon/Realistic in 1952, a great bad girl comic:



Like a lot of the avon comics, this one snatches it's cover from a paperback - in this case, the oddly compelling cover from Avon Paperback 179:

The issue kicks off with a stunning inside cover from Tex Bleisdell. I think this montage is absolutely fantastic - these Avon inside front covers are often the high point of the issue:



Tex also executes the first story, "Francine O' Connor - The Empress of Crime," about a woman with amazon features and freakish strength. What can good parents do but send a child like this to live with the carnival...



She falls for a bad carney, and a life of crime ensues. The redhead's fiery temper shows its ugly head:



Her rollercoaster life continues with a stint in the pen (catfight!!!) and rise to head of the prison girl mob. Back on the street, she takes no mess from male mobsters. These are liberated women, after all:



The second story is "Sonny Terhune - Machine-Gun Madman!" featuring Goldfarb and Baer art in which Sonny displays his mastery of the tommy gun by shooting a cigar from a fellow mobster's mouth. Third up, "Lina Foyle: Gun Moll!" with art by Harry Lazarus about a red-headed moll's rise and fall. She's a man smacker too, most definitely a symptom of being a bad girl:





The last story is "Death Comes Laughing" featuring Sid Check art. A series of strange deaths at the asylum leads an investigator to discover something funny in the air. A fun issue, enjoy!

Get the full hi-res scan here.