The demographic overlap between teen humor comics and periodicals such as Tiger Beat was not lost on DC during the late 60′s and early 70′s. As a consequence, text pages spotlighting teenybopper darlings of the moment were a regular feature in later issues of titles like Swing with Scooter or Date with Debbi.

Barring the occasional oddity, the pieces followed the standard puff piece template with items such as this one from a 1971 issue of Swing with Scooter…

…which enticed the tweeners of yesteryear with the romantic dream of sharing a future with a former teen idol who bitterly resents the Faustian bargain that made him America’s transitory sweetheart.

As I said, pretty typical stuff.

The only weird thing about the article is the photo-illustration which accompanied it. The four-color printing process used by comics at the time could never quite pull off a satisfactory level of photographic reproduction, and attempts to doctor (i.e. “paint over”) pictures for legibility’s sake only made a bad situation worse.

That said, I can’t imagine any scenario where this rich slice of nightmare…

…could have ever been a photo, drawing, or cave painting of the man otherwise known as Keith Partridge. Where are the rebelliously (but not dangerously so) long feathered locks? The dreamy squint? The polyester rugby shirt with the fashionably unbuttoned collar?

Clearly some mistake has been made, a hypothesis borne out by this article which appreared in an issue of Date With Debbi around the same time:

(Interestingly enough, the article did not list “get the shit beat out of me by David Cassidy’s sit-com sibling in one of the most depressing spectacles ever aired on national television” as one of the things on poor Barry’s wish list.)

Though the evidence for a simple screw up in DC editorial’s “hideous celebrity caricature” file seems pretty strong, I still have doubts whether the person in the image is actually supposed to be Barry Williams. He does bear a stronger resemblance to Greg Brady than Keith Partridge, but I can’t shake the feeling it was actually modeled after Gong Show host Chuck Barris:

Mystery solved.

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