Vintage Comic Book Ads

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Vintage Comic Book Ads

If today's Generation Y and Z-ers accuse us Baby Boomers of being cynical and distrustful, well, I for one blame it all on comic books. How many of us who grew up in the 1960s and early '70s were lured by those enticing ads promising everything from X-Ray vision to frolicking, crown-wearing sea monkey pets for a mere couple of bucks? It took (in my case) a best friend with a generous weekly allowance and two parents who worked outside of the home to open my young eyes to the sad fact that advertisements didn't always tell the truth.
Ever had that moment flipping through an old comic book from the '90s and been like "Wow, Sega Genesis really costs that much?" or seen an ad for video tapes? Better yet, an ad for a product that either doesn't exist anymore or was flat out proven not to work? Well, hindsight is 20/20 so the further we look back sometimes the more outlandish those ads become.

Sometimes the ads are so insane we can't believe they actually existed, and claimed to do what they advertised. From an ad to "Be Taller!" or "Instantly Lose Weight!" or advertisements for real pet monkeys and free turtles! Times were different then.

These aren't only ads for products that are cute and aww shucks because of the time period (though there are a few of those too), these are the creme de la creme of those classic ads. The ones you'd see plastered on the back of every silver age comic or on the back pages of some classic Spider-Man tale. These are the very best vintage comic book ads!

 

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The famous Charles Atlas print advertisements became iconic mostly because they were printed in cartoon form from the 1930s on, and in many comic books from the 1940s onwards – in fact continuing long after Atlas' death. The typical scenario, usually expressed in comic strip form, presented a skinny young man (usually accompanied by a female companion) being threatened by a bully. The bully pushes down the "97-pound weakling"[13] and the girlfriend joins in the derision. The young man goes home, gets angry (usually demonstrated by his kicking a chair), and sends away for the free Atlas book. Shortly thereafter, the newly muscled hero returns to the place of his original victimization, seeks out the bully, and beats him up. He is rewarded by the swift return of his girlfriend and the admiration of onlookers.

 

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Spalding Basketballs ad with Dr. J (Julius Erving) and Rick Barry, art by Jack Davis.

 

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Sea Monkeys are sold in hatching kits as noveltyaquariumpets. Developed in the United States in 1957, at this point being just part of the Artemia salina species,[1] by Harold von Braunhut, the product was heavily marketed, especially in comic books, and remains a presence in popular culture.
Sea-Monkeys were intensely marketed in comic books throughout the 1960s and early 1970s[6] using illustrations by the comic-book illustrator Joe Orlando. These showed humanoid animals that bear no resemblance to the crustaceans.[7] Many purchasers were disappointed by the dissimilarity and by the short lifespan of the animals.Harold Von Braunhut is quoted as stating: "I think I bought something like 3.2 million pages of comic book advertising a year. It worked beautifully."

 

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In the 1970s and 1980s, Hostess snack foods were frequently featured in whole page comic book advertisements in major publishers such as DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Harvey Comics, Archie Comics and Gold Key Comics.

The format featured a complete one page comic strip story, drawn by one of the relevant publisher's artists such as Neal Adams for DC and Frank Miller for Marvel, where major characters from the publisher of the periodical solve a problem with Hostess Brands products. In the DC and Marvel ads, a superhero defeats typically defeats a villain by distracting and/or bribing them with those products, although there is also a series of advertisements individually featuring the supervillains, The Joker and the Penguin, failing to do the same with their enemies. In the other publishers, their humor focus allowed more varied plots along the same theme.
https://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/11/the_10_dumbest_comic_book_hostess_ads.php

 

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Grit is a magazine, formerly a weekly newspaper, popular in the rural U.S. during much of the 20th century. It carried the subtitle "America's Greatest Family Newspaper". In the early 1930s, it targeted small town and rural families with 14 pages plus a fiction supplement. By 1932, it had a circulation of 425,000 in 48 states, and 83% of its circulation was in towns of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.