Classic Ads: From the Battlefield to Your Backyard!

Having a comic book collection that spans over half a century, I'm continually fascinated by comic book ads and the insight they offer into their native eras.  My favorites were the eclectic, low-budget ads published prior to the 1980's, before slick campaigns for video games and junk food crowded out all of the fly-by-night hucksters, musclemen, and pranksters.

In that pre-1980's era, you never knew what you'd see advertised in those crazy-quilt grids of low-tech capitalism. In fact, taken together, it's astounding to realize just how much bizarre and flat-out dangerous stuff was readily available to the average kid of the 1950's, 60's, and 70's. Sure, there were the karate ads promising forbidden knowledge of secret pressure points...ads for fireworks, live monkies, model rockets, and sweepstakes with knives, whips, and axes for prizes. But they were nothing compared to the deadly loot available from the US Army Surplus ads!

When the US military no longer needed various types of equipment, it would sell the surplus items at public auction, usually to entrepreneurs who'd then sell the goods to the general public through surplus stores or ads like this one. Appearing in late 1966 issues of Marvel comics, this half-page ad is tough to decipher at first glance due to its tiny type and cluttered layout. So, instead of straining your eyes to read those itty-bitty blocks of copy, let me blow a few of them up...because they've got to be seen to be believed.  Keep in mind, these ads were aimed squarely at children and teenagers. Look this stuff...and imagine you're a kid in 1966 with a few bucks to spend.  What would YOU buy?

Machettes? Hand & Leg Irons? CANNONS?

Now, alot of this stuff was well beyond what one kid could afford in 1966, but you'd be surprised how much money enterprising Baby Boomers could scrape together in no time flat! How many neighborhoods do you think pooled their resources together for their very own jeep, boat, airplane, or passenger bus?

Army weapons and vehicles not your style? Well, in another ad from the same comic book, the smart kids could spend $6.95 for their very own Atomic Energy Lab!

Truly an age of WONDERS (and cheap, readily-available cannons)!

Comments

[Hube]

"Spinthariscope????" As in, "Thar she spins!!!" ???

This was hilarious. This is one ad I never recall seeing in those old 60s comics.

[Comic Coverage]

Maybe there was a reason we didn't see this ad in heavy rotation...possibly due to so many kids ordering cannons, leg irons, and passenger buses!

[greenblade]

I seem to remember ads for stuff like a Davey Crockett-style fort that looked really cool in the ad picture (everything always does in ads), but it was really a plastic bag you put over a table;

a big rocket that kids could actually get in!

a helicopter that really flew. The picture had kids in the cockpit, but it was really a small plastic one;

big bags and footlockers of army men who were flat;

dogs that fit in a teacup;

I wanted to become a superhero by getting the
X-ray spex and voice thrower and whatever else
seemed like a super power (Charles Atlas muscles?).

I once ordered a phantom mask from Famous Monsters. In the picture, it was a really cool Batman-looking thing that covered your whole face and shoulders in black-velvety kinda stuff. When it came, it was an olive- colored army surplus snow mask or something. it looked nothing like the ad. Darn...

[David E Martin]

On NPR a commentator once recounted the story of when he ordered one of those live monkeys from a comic book. As I recall, the poor scared thing rsan for the top of the highest thing in the room and stayed there. Over the course of the next days they family discovered thsat not only were monkeys not housebroken, they used their poop as projectile weapons.

Hopefully somedday someone will put together a nice nostalgia album of all these long-lost ads.
It was chilling to find ads featuring a smiling OJ Simpson hawking some bicycle accessory to kids.