I was rather surprised that the second issue Teen-Age Horizons of Shangrila didn't improve on the first, but perhaps that's just the high expectations I have for Denis Kitchen's standards. The book opens with another story of "Hungry Chuck Biscuits" by Daniel Cline, this one about Chuck assassinating an ex-girlfriend who dumped him for another guy. Justin Green follows with a two-pager about a guy who sets up a fake fight with his buddy to make him look good in front of his girlfriend, but the plan backfires. Peter Loft contributes an interminable tale about a frog trying to rescue three of his offspring from a high-school biology lab (the connection with the theme of teenagers is tenuous at best).

Richard "Grass" Green has a reasonably funny story called "The Haunted Mansion," but even the usually reliable Green fails to produce his best work here. And I'm not sure what to make of Trina Robbins' "One Flower Child's Search." It's a story about a young hippie woman who gets pregnant by her dope-fiend boyfriend and then runs away from him to move out to California, where she ends up living in a "free-love" commune with a bunch of acid-popping freaks. I can't tell if this is a derisive satire or more like an autobiography, though it could be a little bit of both.

Teen-Age Horizons of Shangrila #2 suffers from the same problem that its predecessor did: it mostly portrays teenagers as mean, stupid and/or gross people. Maybe it's just me, but some of the stories are just too dumb and predictable, which is the death knell for an underground comic.

Like the first printing of the first issue of Teen-Age Horizons, the second includes advertising for head shops and hippie stores in an eight-page section in the middle of the book. But unlike the first issue, the ads are not just from local Milwaukee businesses. They come from Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Louisiana and New York, and they're pretty cool nostalgia. There's also an ad for Robert Crumb's Keep on Truckin' Orchestra, whose 78 RPM record River Blues was produced and sold by Krupp.

Undergrounds had a well-established tradition of carrying virtually no paid advertising from non-comic businesses, so it was a novel (and profitable) homage to include advertising in this issue just like the first printing of the first issue. But it's a shame that I would point to commercial advertising as one of the most interesting things in a comic book. For a two-issue anthology from the highly regarded Kitchen Sink, this title really sucks.



HISTORICAL FOOTNOTES:
It is currently unknown how many copies of this comic book were printed. It has not been reprinted.

COMIC CREATORS:
Richard "Grass" Green - 1, 19 (ad), 27-34, 41-42
Pete Poplaski - 1 (color)
Joel Beck - 2
Dan Clyne - 3-5
Justin Green - 6-7
Trina Robbins - 8-9, 35-39
Peter Loft - 10-18, 20-22 (ad), 25 (ad)
Tim Boxell (aka Grisly) - 23 (ad), 40
Robert Armstrong - 26 (ad)
Jay Lynch - 44