Michelle Nolan

“The 68-page first issue of Calling All Girls contained four comic stories—an 8-pager on Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the current queen); a 9-pager on famed author Osa Johnson, “the famed jungle adventuress,” as the story so quaintly dubbed her; a fictional 7-pager on Judy Wing, Air Hostess No. 1 (aviation themes were huge in the early years of comics, just as they were in all of popular culture); and a fictional 8-pager on the teenage adventures of the Yorktown Younger Set, which “lives in a town like yours.

The other half of the first issue contained text stories of a wide variety, with an astonishing amount of reading material for the teen girl’s dime. There was a 4-page story devoted to Connie Martin, a Nancy Drew knockoff; a 4-pager devoted to circus girls; a 3-pager on Gloria Jean herself; a 3-pager by publisher George Hecht on “13 ways girls can help in the national defense”; a 2-pager on manners; a 3-pager by best-selling sports novelist John R. Tunis on women in sports; a 2-pager on grooming; a 4-pager on a fictional female boater; a 2-pager on films; a 2-pager on fashion, with delightful drawings; a page on fashion accessories; and a 2-pager on cooking, by the famed food writer Cecily Brownstone. This issue gave girls an awful lot of reading, some of it inspirational and showing they could be more than “just a girl,” as the boys in Tubby’s clubhouse used to call Little Lulu and her friends a decade later in their Dell Comics adventures.

The most intriguing aspect of Calling All Girls is that it approached schoolgirls not as boy-crazy or male-dependent, but as interesting individuals in their own right. The ensuing issues of Calling All Girls expanded on this theme. This was definitely a mini “feminist manifesto” for teens!”
― Michelle Nolan, Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics