Tippy Teen #19

History

Tower Comics was founded in 1965 by Harry Shorten — reportedly the only new comics publisher to enter the market that year — and was edited by Wally Wood and Samm Schwartz, both veterans of Archie Comics. Schwartz, who had long been associated with the Jughead title at Archie, conceived and drew Tippy Teen as Tower's teen-humor flagship, recruiting a roster of moonlighting Archie artists including Harry Lucey and Dan DeCarlo. Later issues of the run, which #19 falls within, also feature contributions from Doug Crane, who would later work as an animator on properties such as He-Man and The Smurfs. By mid-1968 the series had shifted away from its original thick, 64-page format toward a leaner page count, reflecting the broader contraction at Tower that preceded the publisher's 1969 closure.

Trivia · 7 facts

• Published June 1968 by Tower Comics as part of the Tippy Teen series (vol. 1), which ran from 1965 to 1969 alongside the publisher's entire existence.
• Cover depicts Tippy dressed as the Easter Bunny, a seasonal gag image noted in multiple collector references.
• Interior stories (per Grand Comics Database-sourced product data) include: 'The Jealous Game,' 'What's Happening, Baby?,' 'Cultural Exchange,' 'A Fraud In Her Future,' 'Keeping 'Em In Stitches,' and 'Come As You Aren't.'
• The issue includes photo/feature content spotlighting contemporary pop musicians Neil Diamond and Vanilla Fudge, consistent with the series' recurring practice of integrating real-act photo spreads alongside fictional comedy stories.
• Primary creative contributors to the series at this stage included Samm Schwartz (editor, artist, creator), Doug Crane (artist, later a professional animator), and Jack Mendelsohn (writer/artist, later a writer on the Sabrina the Teenage Witch animated series).
• Atlas Seaboard later reprinted stories from the Tippy Teen series with the title character's name changed to Vicki Young, while her supporting cast's names were left unchanged.
• Because Tower never registered its titles with the U.S. Copyright Office and the copyright notice in the first issue was incorrectly placed under the law then in effect, the entire Tippy Teen cast — including all characters appearing in issue #19 — is considered to have entered the public domain upon original publication.