Can I get a monkey, mom? Comic Ads of the 1950s
As the ComicBloc explores comics through the last 6 decades, I thought I would take a look at the non-story content of these comics; the ads.
Comic books have evolved greatly since their golden age of the 40s and 50s and the advertising in them has changed dramatically as well. Back when a fresh copy of Wonder Woman would only set you back a dime, you could order some pretty interesting things from within the pages of those epic stories.
During the era of the Red Scare and the beginning of the space race, comicbook ads were copy heavy monstrosities that made impossible promises to their young audience. In a time that is often thought of as ‘gentler and simpler’ children could order realistic looking hand grenades, 6 foot long tanks, and various live animals from the pages of their comics.
Full page ads for what would not be considered pyramid schemes lured kids in with X-Ray glasses, free puppies, and even the promise of a live pony (I have no idea how many widgets you’d need to sell to get the pony but I bet no one ever earned enough). The 50s saw the majority of back covers graced with the image of Charles Atlas and his plan to keep the comic reading population of skinny nerds from getting beat up at the beach. Does anyone know anyone that ever got beat up at the beach? Was this such an epidemic back then that Mr. Atlas was able to create an entire industry around it?
Realistic weapons were offered as cap exploding devices. Grenades, tommy-guns, pistols and more, all realistically styled, no bright orange barrels or overly cartoonish shapes for those days! The popularity of westerns both in film and comics was most likely directly responsible for the proliferation of 6 shooter cap gun ads being run.
Ads that weren’t trying to get kids to sell ‘wonder salve’ or buy living creatures were often difficult to distinguish from the pages of the comic itself. Much like more modern advertising during Saturday morning cartoons, the ads hope to be consumed while disguised as more fun comic content than a sales device. Double Bubble ads appeared as half page comic strips and featured such compelling dialogue as “Look, gang! theres a real live indian behind those bushes! We’ll sneak up quietly and take his scalp!” Upon the reveal to be a girls best Sunday-go-to-metting-hat the gang makes peace by offering her a piece of gum. Other candy ads were more sublime and just used the trickery of looking like a continuation of the comic to get kids attention.
The idea of using ads that look similar to the content they appear next to is well older than the 50s and still persists today. Comics from the 1950s are a fantastic showcase for this type of ‘sneaky’ advertising. The others make bold claims and look like older vintage ads from early print, with way too much copy, too many font faces and over promises galore.
“In 10 minutes of FUN a day I changed myself from this bloodless, pitiful, skinny shrimp to this new muscular, red-blooded head to toe HE-MAN!”.
While using the overzealous copy style of the era, if you really make a direct comparison to todays television ads for such amazing products as the “Hawaii-Chair” and similar products, advertising really has not changed that much over time. Promising overnight results that can’t possibly happen from simply using the advertised product alone.
By far my favorites are the ads offering live animals. One promised a “Real live miniature dog” (looks like a Chihuahua) in exchange for selling 20 color photo enlargement coupons. The fascinating thing about this ad is not only the logistics of shipping a puppy, but that the product it offers, color photo enlargements is something we all do for free on our computers and cameras. The squirrel monkey was simply that, an ad for a squirrel monkey. While it was more expensive ($18.95 in 1950 kids dollars = roughly $760 today, based on 10 cents for a comic compared to $4 now). I would love to know if anyone actually ordered one, and what kid of free bonus diseases it came with.
Most of the ads were for candy or items to sell to earn prizes, which sadly required the clipping of a coupon from the comic page itself to send in to the advertiser. Thankfully the majority of these coupons were not redeemed and the precious comics remain mainly intact for us to enjoy 60 years later.