Guest Writer - Remember Those Ads in Comics?

Doug: And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when the call went out for more good stuff from our guest writers. And lo, a cry to assist rose up from the Balkans, as Edo Bosnar did send his thoughts westward. Hearken ye then, back to the Bronze Age and those pages in between your story pages... which were often just as much fun!

Edo Bosnar: First off, I have to say that I always love looking at ads in older periodicals, and not just in comics. Back in college, part of some research I was doing for a thesis paper involved looking for articles in issues of news magazines, etc. from the 1930s. I remember spending many more hours than I needed to in the university library’s periodical archives paging through the bound volumes of Time, Newsweek and National Geographic, mainly just looking at the ads (my favorites: the ones that talked up the health benefits of, say, Lucky Strike cigarettes (one of said benefits was aiding digestion) or Coca-Cola – I kid you not, there was an ad showing a nurse carrying a tray of Coke bottles to be served to hospital patients to aid in their recovery).

But I digress; the point I’m trying to make is that an additionally fun part of reading comics is looking at the ads, at least is it for those comics from roughly the mid-1980s and all earlier periods (the ads in most comics after that time are generally much less interesting to me).

For the longest time the mainstays of comic book ad pages were like the one above, just packed with all kinds of novelties, with which I’m sure we’re all familiar (and perhaps some of you have even ordered some of these items – feel free to share your stories). And, of course, there were the wonderful Sea Monkeys:

 

By the way, I recently learned that the guy who came up with the idea of marketing brine shrimp in this way, Harold von Braunhut, had a bit of an unsavory dark side. Earlier this year, the Stuff You Missed in History Class site had a podcast dedicated to just this subject.

The ads for selling Grit seemed ubiquitous in comic books during the 1970s, and they always mystified me. Who actually read Grit? I remember joking around about this in college with a few friends; we eventually came to the conclusion that “Grit” was some kind of pyramid scheme in which the poor kids trying to sell it ended up with stacks of unsold copies in their bedrooms because they couldn’t convince anyone to buy them (kind of like those poor folks with garages full of Amway products).

 

However, much later (like about 10 years ago), I learned that Grit was not only a real thing, but is still published to this day, and that it’s been around since the late 1800s. Interestingly enough, it was/is apparently sold and read mostly in small rural communities – it must have been more of a Midwest thing, because I grew up in a small, unincorporated rural community (it used to be an actual village) about 15 miles north of Salem, OR, I never recall seeing it at any of the homes of neighbors or friends.

 

One thing I noticed about the ads from the ‘70s in particular is that they mainly seemed geared to three general age-groups: pre-teen children, hence the ads for candy, toys, novelties, etc., boys in their early teens (to whom the BB gun and “get muscled up” ads were probably geared), and, apparently, men in their 20s who were either high school or college drop-outs, either unemployed or working dead-end jobs. Hence stuff like this:

Or this:

I wonder if the publishers had some kind of hard demographic data on their readers, or it was just an assumption being made on the part of advertisers – because we all know the long-standing prejudice from non-comic fans that comics were only read by little children, socially maladjusted teens and semi-literate adults. Anyway, probably my all-time favorite of the many “career-change”/vocational school ads is this Fumetti, from my copy of Brave & the Bold #109 (1973):

There’s just something so amusing about the way the guys in the photos really seemed to be getting into their roles, what with the exaggerated facial expressions and gesticulation.

I think the ads that are best remembered – at least judging by how often they get mentioned at various comic book-related blogs and other sites (I know they’ve come up in the comments here at the BAB), are comics-within-comics, the most common being, of course, the Hostess ads in which our favorite Marvel or DC heroes overcome their foes with the help of processed sugary confections. I won’t really go into these here, as they’ve been covered at length in the comics blogosphere over the years (for starters, you can find all of them, it seems, at either Seanbaby’s Hostess Page or a similar Hostess page at Tomorrow’s Heroes, while the Comic Vine has a page of text summaries.

But another popular sub-set of these comic ads were those selling footwear, from athletic shoes to cowboy boots, and of these my favorite were for AAU tennis shoes (never had a pair), starring the AAU Shuperstar, who saved the world from foul (smelling?) footwear-based villains, mainly with the power of superior puns:

Although he used an explosive kick to launch Dirty Sneaker into outer space, for what seems a particularly grisly end:

 

There was at least one other one, because I remember another of the Shuperstar’s adversaries was named Missile-Toe, but alas, it’s in none of the comics I now own.

I could go on and on about these ads, but I’ll just cut it off here, and leave this last image without comment, because even when I saw it as a pre-teen, my first reaction was something like “Wha-huh…?” And it still makes me scratch my head to this day: