In parts of the world today is Valentine’s Day, so in commemoration of this lovely corporate holiday we have this issue of True Romances, with awesome cover art painted by Georgia Warren. It goes way back to 2012. Well, it goes back, really, to 1935. But for us it goes back to 2012, when we picked it up on a trip to Denver. We gave it to one of the Pulp Intl. girlfriends, and she was flattered, but strangely, never read it. She prefers to read about cryptocurrencies for some reason. So after a while we took the magazine back, and now we’ve torn it apart and scanned it. We actually swore not to damage it, but it was impossible to scan something so fragile and keep that promise, so now Romances is truly dead.
But it’s not a great loss, because there isn’t much romance in the magazine anyway—certainly not enough to lure P.I.1 away from her cryptocurrency news. There are a few sweet stories, yes, but it’s mostly emotional extortion and body shaming. Scan five, titled “Mental Cases I Have Met,” pretty much encapsulates the entire enterprise. Turns out the mental cases were suffering from a lack of confidence in their maxi pads. The P.I. girlfriends say all of this had to be written by men, and they could be right, though most of the credits are feminine. We tend to think the attributions are accurate, but we’ll never know. Below we have almost forty scans from this rare publication, and whether the content was created by men in disguise or not, from a 2019 perspective it’s all pretty enjoyable. See for yourself.
