Warren Publishing is best known for it's three main black& white comic magazines, Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella which all ran for a number of years clocking up well over a hundred issues apiece. These comics were aimed at "older" readers and circumvented the censorious Comics Code Authority by being sold as magazines rather than on the comic racks. All anthologies and with some continuing characters such as Vampirella and The Rook they were generally a good read.
Then came Heavy Metal magazine and Warren decided to "get in on the act" but since they were unable to afford to publish a glossy colour magazine chose their existing format with which to "compete". However there was a problem.
The company simply did not understand the difference between "erotic" and "juvenile" which showed in the final product which could have been dreamed up by a bunch of pre-pubescent schoolboys and probably attracted them as an audience
Some of the stories weren't just "sexist" to the extreme as was the culture amongst many in the seventies but also became offencive, particularly a story in #3 which was racist to the core illustrating a world on which blacks were hunted by the white population. I haven't read this but it's infamous content is described in Back Issue #88 in an article by Richard J Ardnt.
Most of the material in this first issue is disappointing and will not be on my collecting list, though the company did tone the contents down a bit when they changed the title to 1994 with #11.
Despite this magazine did last until Warren itself closed down in the early eighties.
Best to stick with their other titles.....
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