Saturday, July 28, 2018

The Sinatra-Johnson Wars!!

Welcome to...

...Keen Teens, the "Comic Magazine For American Girls"!!

And yes, there are two teenage girls on the cover fighting over who is better, Frank Sinatra or Van Johnson. Because while your grandparents were off fighting the war, this is what was going on at home front!

We get pin-ups of our dreamy hunks:


Man, American teen girls must have been desperate for men to lust after...

And we have an actual honest-to-gosh contest: who is better?

And it's not all fun and games--there's actual money at stake!

Thankfully, the ballot leaves room for write-in candidates:

We never find out who wins this "battle." There's no mention of it in issue #2. Then there was a two-year gap between issues 2 and 3...and again no mention.

But #3 did feature this pin-up:

For those two lazy to turn their monitors upside down:

A sign  that Van Johnson won?!?

Sinatra and Johnson apparently were able to get over this struggle of titans and be friendly...here they are on Frank's radio show in 1946 and Frank's TV show in 1958:

It's good to see how well America was able to reunite after the trauma of the Sinatra-Johnson wars.

From Keen Teens #1 (1945) and #3 (1947)

1 comment:

Wayne Allen Sallee said...

Van Johnson looks a bit like Al Gore.