Note: I posted this then deleted it because I'm not all too familiar with how fair use works. After talking to someone, they told me that this is more than likely safe as it falls under "education" and "critique." So it's going back up. Hopefully this doesn't lead to trouble.
If there's one thing that's more nostalgic than going through old comic books for the art, it's the ads inside comic books. Whether they're ads for junkfood like Oreos and Hostess Cakes or ads for video games and baseball cards, if it's something you can market to the 8-25 male demographic, putting an ad out in a comic book probably gives you a good return for your money. After all, little kids will be bugging their moms left and right for the latest and greatest and those teenagers need to spend their hard earned summer job cash on something. Right? Comics and ads just go together.
One of the things I'm really enjoying about my whole journey into comic book decoupage is that it comes with the side benefit of allowing me to collect advertisements as well. You'll have your standard comic book cross promotions like these . . .
. . . which let you know what's going on in other titles, in hopes that you'll pick them up. By the way, I'm half tempted to get that Eternal Warrior ad framed. I like it. Don't judge me.
Video games also make up a huge chunk of comic book ads.
Here are two very well known Capcom games. Just looking at those ads bring back memories of Saturday mornings. But you'll also get more esoteric ads such as this puppy . . .
YEAH! The muthafuckingSEGACDbitches! Remember that shit? Seriously. Hot damn, does that ad scream “'90s.”
There are also ads for movies, such as the all ages appropriate Nightmare Before Christmas . . .
and the family friendly classic Natural Born Killers.
Every now and again, you'll get an ad that genuinely is esoteric. It's something of a head scratcher at first, but once you think about it, it might make sense. Such as this ad for a Yamaha synthesizer . . .
Chances are, there's that one guy in college reading Captain America who is also really into music and has a couple hundred bucks of dad's money burning a hole in his pocket. Hell, for all we know, it might have been kleinbl00 or thenewgreen that saw this ad and found themselves half tempted to pick this puppy up. Who knows?
Sometimes though, sometimes you come across an ad that just doesn't make any sense at all. It's so nonsensical, it stands out more because of it. Like an ad for a vacuum cleaner.
I took that picture while the comic book was still intact. You know why? Cause if I saw that ad all by itself, torn out with nothing to refer to where it came from, I never, not in a million years, would have believed it came from a comic book. Seriously. I don't even know what to think.
My nearest cousins were minimum 6 years, maximum 18 years older than me. Three of them babysat me or my sister at one point or another. About 5th grade I got my cousin Larry's comic books, amassed during his adolescence from 1968 to 1973. That woulda been the absolute nadir of the comics market - pretty much right before Watchmen came out. There wasn't a single title you'd recognize - they were all horror comics, a bunch of non-superhero Charlton titles and the like. I don't remember a single storyline, although I immediately knew what The Black Freighter was about when I saw it. The ads were amazing. For one thing, it conclusively proved that the toys my cousins had to play with kicked the shit out of mine. My Great White Whale is a poster I saw in the back of one of those comics. They used to have these spreads of all these posters you could order (for a dollar). Head shop shit in an era before Dark Side of the Moon, when Woodstock was still a disruption rather than an iconic event. Each image was about half the size of a postage stamp, but there was one of a man sitting on top of a metropolis of prismatic glass. That was kind of a theme back then. I still look for that poster sometimes; that one and the Cabaret Voltaire poster in Ferris' room. I've never found either.
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Holy childhood flashbacks! That second pic - that was one of my favourite toys when I was a kid, it was EXACTLY that except mine was orange. Loved that thing.
In Rockford Illinois there is an awesome record shop called Toad Hall. They had tons of old records, books, and posters. They might actually be worth giving a call. At the very least, they might be able to point you in a good direction.
My guess on why that vacuum cleaner ad was in a comic book is that they must have been trying to advertise to the college kid that was on his own or the post-college guy that got his first apartment. The thought process must been the kid on his own for the first time might have needed a vacuum cleaner in order to make his place somewhat respectably clean. There probably wasn't a great effort to put these vacuum ads in comic books but it was just done every so often just to see what could happen. They might have also thought that the mom cleaning the young kid's room might have discovered the comic books and looked at the ads. Imagine cleaning your kid's room and finding a comic book with a vacuum ad. You might have gone, "hmm, maybe I need a new vacuum?" It's a bit of a stretch but that's just my guess on the matter.
I'm really digging that Yamaha ad. I forgot about ads in comics because I rarely ever get single issue comics. Either I'm too poor to afford the expense or I can't decide what to buy, so I end up buying collected trade paperbacks. Actually, up until recently I didn't even pay attention to the writers or artists attached to comics. Superman: American Alien will be the first series I buy solely because I'm interested in what the writer does. I think I'm going to read through my small collection and see which art styles/stories I really like and look up more from those people.
Yeah. The Yamaha ad is one of my favorites so far. The first time I looked at it, I thought "Oh. A Yamaha bike ad. This is cool." It wasn't until I read the text and then took a second look at the helmet that I realized that the ad was really for an electronic keyboard. It's clever enough to make it a definite keeper. I get trades myself, more often than not. There's a lot of benefits to them. You can display them on your bookshelf, they're slightly more durable (if they're printed from a good publisher), and you tend to save yourself about five bucks when compared to picking up all the individual issues. The only drawback is you of course have to wait for the trades and if the book you like isn't a popular title, the publisher might not release a trade for it. As for learning to recognize comic book authors, you're in for a treat. You'll quickly come to find that if you're not actively looking for books by a certain author, you'll at least keep an eye out for their name in case they ever work on a title that interests you. For example, I love Rick Remender for his pulp sci-fi stories Fear Agent and Black Science. When I discovered that he did a story arch for Captain America called Castaway in Dimension Z (here's the Second Book for the whole story) I had to check it out. It didn't disappoint at all. If you ever want title or author recommendations, feel free to give me a shout out. I'll be more than happy to share. Also, I know Reddit is kind of lame these days, but the people over in r/comicbooks often have some great suggestions too.