This wallet incorporates a change purse, retains its manliness, and comes with an ancient retractable pen
You have to love the dusty days of yore when a retractable ballpoint pen was a viable selling point — though this ad is so ancient it apparently came before the invention of the spring (Coily is not pleased). Keep your thumbnail long and poised, apparently.
With the nameplate and the slots for coins (the latter mercifully doing away with the need for a Milhouse Van Houten change purse), this billfold looks strong enough to stop a bullet. Put it in your coat’s inner pocket, right above your heart, and give it a whirl. Whether it trumps a wallet with dancing native girls emblazoned on the side? That question is above this site’s pay grade.
Trading Card Set of the Week (Special Scorched Retinae Edition) – The Silver Surfer (1992, Comic Images)
There’s such a thing as going too far with a concept. Despite its invulnerability, you wouldn’t make the whole plane out of the black box (Seinfeld routines to the contrary). You can’t make a pizza crust out of cheese, though you can certainly hollow it out and cram as much fromage into the breach as you can. A dawn to dusk diet of chocolate sundaes with all the trimmings would be a Candyland-like heaven, but you’d rot from the inside out.
They aren’t good ideas. They’re too much of a good thing. And there are even times when the good thing you can go overboard on isn’t all that great in the first place. Enter the Silver Surfer trading card set. Read more…
Thrill as the world’s most underwhelming magician pulls a Baby Ruth out of his hat
The bar must have been incredibly low for birthday party magicians back in the 1940s. Either that, or the kids here were watching aliens land right behind the above trickster — your choice. Usually to razzle-dazzle an audience, an illusionist with a magic hat has to produce something alive and unlikely out of said chapeau, the standard rabbit or bird being prime examples. Not a Baby Ruth candy bar. Up next: Behold, a strand of my hair! What, is this dude Professory Hinkle, the bumbling “Busy, busy, busy!” guy from Frosty the Snowman?
If he’d managed to create spectral representations of Baby Ruth candy bars, now then we might have something.
(By the way — candy “pep” has again reared its ugly head.)
C.C. Beck’s Captain Tootsie returns to hook more kids on his insidious, “pep”-filled Tootsie Rolls
This ad lacks some of the in-the-wild savagery and Frenchy comeuppance of other Captain Tootsie ads, but never before has our candy-themed champion’s pusher aspect been more to the fore. Sort of like a tall, muscular, blond, cancer-free Walter White. (“Say my name.” “Captain Tootsie.”) He’s only lacking a “The samples were free, now they’ll cost you” utterance to seal the addiction deal. But at least he didn’t chase the miscreant rival school kids down, skin them and make rugs out of them. There’s that.
The “pep” attributes of Tootsie Rolls are questionable (at best short-lived), but one wonders between them and Kelpidine pep pills which product gave you more get up and go and was the 5-hour ENERGY of the 1940s.
Sit back and let this Golden Age heroine headscissor her way into your heart (or at least your loins) – Black Cat #10
Few comic characters have possessed as much inherent eroticism as the Black Cat — the Golden Age Black Cat that is, though the white-haired, fluffy-booted, tightly-attired, Spider-Man-bedeviling version certainly has her allure. The flowing red tresses, the mask, the boobs, the leather and the boots all made Linda Turner’s old-timey alter ego an object of desire both for the men in her fictional universe and the boys of all ages reading her Harvey mag (and women so inclined). We’ve encountered her once before on this blog (almost exactly one year ago — circadian rhythms), when we looked at the first appearance of her young male sidekick, Kit (GET IT?) Weston, who served as a Pavlovian proxy for all the salivating horndogs counting down the hours until the next issue hit the newsstand. We were/are all Kit.
She’s back again. We won’t delve too deeply into the content of this issue, since, well, the cover pretty much says it all about our dear Cat, with an appeal so fierce it could make hearts magically appear over a pipe-smoking man’s hat. The comic contains latently erotic self-defense tips, though, and by God that’s something we have to discuss. Read more…
Camouflage paint — spiritual kinsman of chocolate milk from a brown cow?
I realize that such an item actually exists, but camouflage paint sounds like something Bugs Bunny would use to confound Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Blacque Jacque Shellacque, or any other goofy enemy. Like maybe it’s purchased in the same Home Depot aisle where you get the stuff that lets you paint a hole on the ground, jump into it, then pull it in after you. Like polka-dotted paint. Or striped paint.
At any rate, the product advertised here would let you hide, jump out of a tree and crush your friend’s larynx with a rifle, then slowly watch the life drain out of him. So it had that going for it. Whee! (Maybe pair it with your creepy voyeur spy scope to become an unstoppable peeping machine.)
Considering Wate-On? Let the buxom Quinn O’Hara and a pasty scientist with a beaker allay any doubts.
In the days before heroin chic, heaven forbid you were caught shy a few pounds — ergo the need for assorted powders and calorie bombs to keep your weight up. Read more…
Let the first FF/X-Men meeting guide the (potential) cinematic crossover – Fantastic Four #28
A great stir was created several weeks ago by a little blurb from scribe and FOX/Marvel consultant/éminence grise Mark Millar. He alluded to the potential for FOX’s Marvel properties — the Fantastic Four and the X-Men — to have a crossover at some point in the near future. Granted, the big upcoming “crossover” between the old and new X-Men casts hasn’t hit screens yet, and yes, they haven’t even gotten around to rebooting the up till now mishandled FF franchise (though a do-over is in the works). But the white-hot success of Marvel’s in-house The Avengers has made cinematic conglomerations the order of the day. Finally the corporate bean-counters’ reticence to combine properties (Why have one movie when you can have two?) has been overcome, which was long the primary financial obstacle to comic book movies most closely embodying the colorful mishmash of shared universes. There’s been a recognition of combos being greater than the sum of their parts, hence a Superman sequel with Batman in it. Huzzah! Rejoice and make merry!
With the intriguing possibility of Ben Grimm nose to nose with Logan (one hopefully still played by the enthusiastic Hugh Jackman) fresh on our minds, now is an excellent time to harken back to the very first newsprint meeting of the Four and Charles Xavier’s gifted youngsters. And whaddayou know, I just happened to have a copy sitting on my desk here in the HQ. Who wins when the two original Marvel super-teams throw down? We do, folks. We do. Read more…
Enjoy your carefree go-kart days while they last, boy of the 1960s
Ah, the halcyon days of yore, when youths could careen wildly down suburban lanes in their rickety go-karts, nary a helmet in sight, one hand on the wheel, their vehicle’s engine(!) belching blue smoke into the lower atmosphere. Now kids probably have to pad and wrap themselves up heavier than Nanook of the North to statutorily pilot a go-kart, if such contraptions are still even street legal and not now strictly the province of seedy, low-rent, tire-bordered commercial tracks. There are probably some EPA emissions regulations thrown into the prohibitive mix, too.
Anyway, enjoy it while you can, kid. Vietnam will be here before you know it.
Re-enact Iron Man 2 scenes with your Unisphere Savings Bank
The Unisphere is the enduring symbol of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and it’s one that’s been used time and time again (and again) (and again) in movies. Visually distinctive sculpture has inherent magnetism, one supposes. This piggy bank model would have made a nice keepsake for a youngster attending, though the ad’s textual message — save money so you can buy a ticket — undercuts some of the thrifty fun. If you’re curious what one looks like, click here. Warning: reality is, as usual, underwhelming.
Better than the haunted house bank? The pirate bank? The TV bank? You decide.
Trading Card Set of the Week – Alien (1979, Topps)
In space no one can hear you snap bubblegum.
A hard-R science-fiction/horror film filled with unrelenting overt and subconscious sexual imagery seems an odd choice for bubblegum cards aimed at children — even if said film is a masterpiece. Yet here we are: Alien, the Topps trading cards. Let’s be clear, though, that pointing out incongruity isn’t criticism. That these cards exist is one of the many simple, moderate delights that make life oh so worth living. Read more…
Here’s an old Spider-Man and Thor House of Ideas ad that will make you envy your comic forebears so damn much
Maybe this isn’t the most spectacular juxtaposition of on sale comics from back in the day, but it still highlights fairly well the joys of heading to the Marvel side of the spinner rack in the 1960s, when even average comics were a triumph (though it’s hard to call a Ditko-infused Spider-Man comic with the Green Goblin and the Hulk “average.”) There’s a certain class of people who, if given access to a time machine, wouldn’t use said miraculous device to, say, go back and kill Hitler, or watch Moses part the Red Sea, but would use it to by comics. I confess that I might fall into that class — butterfly effects be damned.
A codicil to this is that no one would ever have such thoughts upon viewing a vintage Charlton ad.
At over seven feet tall, the old Monster Ghost was the Wilt Chamberlain of useless kid junk
This was apparently the child’s playroom equivalent of those giant inflatable stick-men you always see outside pennant-bedecked car dealerships. I’m guessing they weren’t exactly Alfred Pennyworth when it came to “obeying your commands.” The “durable polyethelene” kind of undercuts the “horrible and sinister” menace, too. (Unless you’re a radical environmentalist, living in a yurt and eating organic wheatgrass.) But maybe you could pair it with your fake vampire bat and have yourself a good old bad time.
And what the hell is the deal with the “Peeping Skeleton Hands”? What was going on back in the 1970s?
Really, what self-respecting young Yankees fan would smile joyously while holding an Oriole’s baseball card, even one for genial Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson?
Read more…
The greatest comic book tome of all, considered – From Hell
This year marks the 125th anniversary of the Jack the Ripper murders, a grim remembrance if there ever was. From August 31st to November 9th of 1888, an unknown assailant — if the killings were even perpetrated by the same man — assaulted the London underclass and struck fear into the heart of Victorian England, all the way from squalid doss houses to sylvan Balmoral. In the century and a quarter since, the Ripper has become the paragon of violent evil, a byword for seemingly random, definitely senseless savagery, a handy ghoul to silence unruly children. Dozens of works of fiction, both in print and on screen, have further sensationalized his milieu and his grisly work — his unbound spirit, Redjac, even made it onto Jim Kirk’s U.S.S. Enterprise. Countless books have been published about the Whitechapel murders, with most trying to put a name and a face to the mystery man who — maybe — addressed a taunting note to the constabulary “From Hell.”
And the cruel twist about all those books, whether factual or fanciful? They’re all fiction. No one knows a damn thing more now than the befuddled bobbies did in 1888. In a new millennia, Jack the Ripper is still maddening, an edifice without a capstone.
One thing is fairly certain, though. All of those books and all of those movies pale in comparison to the greatest Ripper rumination of them all, the one that took that infamous, chilling return address for its title: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. Read more…
Jared
blog into mystery 