Back in January I posted about some of DC’s experimental promotions in early 1966. My Silver Age rereading has since made it through the summer of that year and DC’s still in there pitching. Several of the ads feel like the creators want to pull a Stan Lee and convince readers DC’s comics are cool and hip. They do not, however, succeed.
This first house ad, for example, never made me think that by reading DC I’d become a cool cat. Of course I was only eight in 1966, but I doubt I’d have felt differently if I’d been old enough to care about moving to “wide-open-airsville.”
This text in this next one sounds almost as clunky as Bob Haney’s Teen Titans dialog. Though Joe Kubert’s art sure grabs the eye.
This one isn’t bad, but it isn’t terribly memorable either, other than using a character freshly popular due to the Batman TV show.
Overall this old-school house ad was much more effective.
These ads for the Inferior Five tryout in Showcase also worked for me. “Don’t buy this book, the characters are terrible!” is a pitch I hadn’t seen before, nor had I seen anything like the series itself when I read it (I’ll get to it, trust me).
If any of you are currently suffering in Squaresville, I hope this post provides a break to your torment. #SFWApro.
So, wait… all this time, when you’ve been reading Silver Age, you’ve been reading the original floppies?
I’d pictured omnibi or trades or something!
That’s impressive.
It’s a mix. I have a lot of Silver Age DC stuff while most of my Marvel is TPB. Some stuff is via the Big Two’s apps — Action Comics at DC, Sgt. Fury and Hulk at Marvel and so on.
That makes sense.
I kind of figured (after reading this article), that you maybe had been collecting longer than me and have better access to back issues.
That second part is almost certainly true.
I started collecting when I was a kid in ’64. I still have a lot of my old stuff. I don’t know if that means the first part is true too.
Just a bit, since I wasn’t even born in ’64. 😀