I was going through Avengers #83 for my Silver Age reread — it’s one of those where I have the original issue — but once I got past the John Buscema cover —
— I found myself mesmerized by the ads.
Anyone who’s old enough to have read Silver Age comics when they were knew remembers those amazing ads. Alongside the Columbia Record Club we had the opportunity to buy hypnotic glasses, sea monkeys, Polaris submarines, and the infamous X-ray spectacles (if you’re not that old, I recommend Mail Order Mysteries which covers a lot of these wonder products). I think the first ad that grabbed my attention, though, was this one:
Just two hours and I could become so deadly “no man will dare attack you!” Even as a kid I knew this had to be baloney, but as a small, occasionally bullied boy, ads like this — there were quite a lot of them — still had an appeal.
Along with karate classes by mail and the usual bargain-priced products — sea horses! An electric guitar! —
— I was struck by the number of job training ads. Dental assistant! Draftsman!
Not to mention shoe lifts to make me taller! Strangely enough, despite being 5′ 2″ I’ve never been troubled by a wish to add any height.
Computer programming! I don’t know, is there really a future in it?
Ooh, a big future career in accounting! Or I can let folksy actor Charley Weaver show me a fool-proof plan to turn one penny into millions! Hmm, perhaps Charley Weaver’s a fan of Wonder Woman?
How about becoming a game warden? Or having my poems set to music? Or I could simply learn how to have a “he-man voice.”
I suspect a lot of these courses, like many mail-order (and now online) educations, were built around the assumption you’d drop out before completing; otherwise they wouldn’t have the staff to deal with everyone, no matter how cursory the lessons. Even so, I’m less curious about what they were selling than the fact they were selling at all. Were there that many desperate job-seekers looking for sources of training in comic-book ads? Did they get enough takers to make the cost of the ads worthwhile? Did the seahorses arrive dead?
Questions. So many questions.
Those old comic ads were certainly weird. It always made me wonder if people actually responded to them, most were probably scammy.
I do remember the one with the X-Ray specs, that obviously allowed you to see through women’s clothing
According to mail-order mysteries, many of them were scams, a few were at least halfway genuine.
According to Mail-Order Mysteries, the X-ray specs had feather vanes between the layers of the lenses. They created a diffraction effect so you could imagine the darker areas were, in fact, the skeleton inside the person you were looking at. I guess even if it had been real you’d have seen women’s bones rather than women’s naked bodies.
Oh, the ads in comics remained amazing well after the Silver Age, in fact all through the ’70s and into the early ’80s. (In fact, I even wrote a post about them 10 (! … f-ing hell) years ago at another blog). It was all still there, i.e., the mail order crap, the correspondence courses, etc. and the self-defense stuff was ramped up to 11 with the Count Dante ads.
Otherwise, don’t know about the sea horses, but the squirrel monkeys (still can’t believe those were sold through the mail) did apparently arrive live – there’s a great account of someone who did so back in the 1960s in an old CBR post.
I remember the Count Dante ads.
The Men From NOWHERE plot in Morrison’s Doom Patrol had extensive Easter eggs relating to the old ads.
My favorite of these appeared in issue 190 of the Incredible Hulk: Helium.
21cu ft of helium and 10 balloons for just $3.95.
I’m sure they made dozens of sales.
When I lived in Williamsport, I was blown away when I walked by the old headquarters for the Grit newspaper. Those ads were in every Bronze Age comic I read.
I sold an article to Grit once. I remember the ads, too. Including Richie Rich’s father explaining selling Grit was how he got started on the road to riches.