Comic Book Ads as Comics

By | Thursday, February 17, 2022 3 comments
If you're going to take out a full page ad in a comic book, it's not that great a leap of logic to present it in a comic format. Take advantage of the medium you're advertising in, right? And while the classic Charles Atlas "Hero of the Beach" ads are the most famous (probably followed by the Hostess ads featuring licensed superheroes), they were hardly the first or the last to utilize the idea. So for today's post, I've pulled together a small collection of full page comic book ads done in a comic format. I believe the earliest one I have here is the Sam Spade hair tonic ad from 1948.

Perhaps worth noting is that the Spalding ad was drawn by Jack Davis, Captain Tootsie by C.C. Beck, and Tarzan by Joe Kubert. I'm guessing Sgt. Shark was done by a three-year-old.
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3 comments:

Billy Hogan said...

Of the samples you displayed, the Rocky and Bullwinkle Cheerios ad is the one I most often saw in my comic books during the mid to late 1960's.

I was a little later -- the ads I saw most often were the Aurora Ready Rangers or the Spalding basketball ones.

Andy Reynolds said...

Street Ball immediately came to mind when I saw the title of your article. Helped define a brief period of my comic-reading youth I like to call, "Still Only 35 Cents!"