The grimmest comic book ad I’ve ever seen

Posted by: Scott Tags: ad, Captain Midnight, comics Posted date: July 19, 2015 | 2 Comments

Imagine you’re a kid in 1943, and you open your copy of Captain Midnight #8 to find, not an ad for a teacup-sized monkey …

… or X-Ray Specs …

… or even those infamous sea monkeys …

… but instead an inner cover that promises, “If they win … only our dead are free.”

I know there was a war on, but this is the stuff of nightmares.

“Only the host who will fall before the enemy will know peace. Civilization will be set back a thousand years.”

Yikes!

If I was a kid back then, I don’t think I’d’ve believed even Captain Midnight could have saved me from that!

Instead of reading the comic, I might have thrown it aside and hidden under the bed. Especially since my only hope of survival—a Polaris nuclear submarine—

—wouldn’t be for sale in the backs of comic books for decades!

2 Comments for The grimmest comic book ad I’ve ever seen

Joe c

Oh those poor kids: “Gee for a 7 foot sub, this box it comes in looks awfully small…”

Morris Keesan

I never had one of those 7-foot Polaris subs, but as a civilian employee of the US Navy Bureau of Ships (which exempted him from the draft during WWII), my father went on the shakedown cruise of at least one nuclear sub. We didn’t know where he was going when he would occasionally go away for a week or two, but he would talk about having trouble for a few days getting his “land legs” back. I didn’t find out about his involvement with the USS Nautilus until that information was declassified, some time after his retirement in the mid-1960s.