Comic Ads in the 2000s
A new century for comic books means a new century for comic book ads. The 2000s saw several advances in printing technologies as well as paper quality in comics. This opened the door for fancier and glossier ads to fill the spaces between story pages.
Long gone are the days of the classic comic ads. No more live monkeys, no more giant cardboard submarines. No more multipanel sell-our-junk-and-you-can-earn-this-other-junk ads. Comic ads really grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. They now mirror magazine ads in quality and production. The hostess ads that featured our favorite heros thwarting villains with the aid of Twinkies have been replaced by Got Milk ads.
Video games and movies saw an explosion in their advertisements in the last few decades, following their rapid technological advancement. Kids don’t have time to sell seed packets door to door anymore because they are plugged into their Nintendo.
Coat tailing on the explosive success of comics in the 1990s, which spun off into films and television shows, comic books became a much more viable medium for advertisers to spend the media dollars on. The previous decades ‘little-guy’ advertising was being quickly replaced by big company, big budget ads. Even with the comic market shrinking after the collectors bubble burst, the door had been opened for higher production ads to remain in our comics.
The success of comic book based movies gave a legitimacy to the medium that spawned them and advertisers saw them as an inexpensive way to reach a well defined target market; predominately male, 12-24 years old. Ads took on a slightly more mature feeling, targets at the upper end of this range. No more hand drawn Bazooka Joe cartoons for us now, no we were to be subjected high production value, generically glossy, professional ads.
The irony of the success of comics and the subsequent increase in ad sales is that the ads lost a lot of their uniqueness and flavor. Photoshopping a milk mustache onto Batman takes far less creative effort than the hand drawn and heavily over worded ads of days now gone. The older, less refined ads actually seem to have been better targeted toward their comic based audience as well as having a voice that was specific to the comic. The ads being run in more recent times have a more generic feel to them and appear in their same form in other forms of print.
The competition for the attention of the comic book reader demographic really expanded in this time period. The emergence of video games as one of the leading past times for these eyeballs made it more difficult to reach them with traditional print ads. Kids were spending more and more time with their increasing complex video games (and still are) and less and less with comics.
Glossy paper was the real driving force behind the upgrades to the advertising in the early 2000s. With higher quality paper, the ads looked much better and the floodgates opened for high color, full photographic based ads.
I don’t know if I’ve ever bought a product because of advertising, I am sure there is a subconscious influence that we are all unaware of. As technology advances at a break neck pace, I find myself longing for the earlier days of comic ads, when I COULD get a monkey by selling seeds, instead of an industry wide ad for simply ‘Milk’. Maybe you can’t get a live animal through the pages of your comics anymore, but the old issues are still around and let you escape to that time, even if only for an hour.