If Marvel claimed Blaze the Wonder Collie was “America’s most respected comic magazine” of 1949, who am I to disagree?

(published in Lawbreakers Always Lose #10, October 1949.)

I was reading the December 1916 issue of The Scoop (as one does), a magazine “written by newspaper men for newspaper men,” which is filled with fascinating anecdotes about the way the world was for journalists 100 years ago, when I came across a reminder that the technology we think of as essential often … isn’t.

A full-page ad which appears on the back cover decries the fact Congress appropriated funds for continued mail delivery by pneumatic tubes in New York City, but failed to do the same for Chicago. According to the ad (which is unsigned, so is apparently more of an editorial), there were 10 miles of two-way, eight-inch tubes running under Chicago at the time which delivered 8,000,000 pieces of mail daily.

In response to the idea that mail should instead be delivered by trucks rather than pneumatic tubes, the question is asked, “If we are going backward, why not get a wheelbarrow?”

“Any change,” insists the author of this piece, “would be calamitous.”

Well, here we are, a century later, and that calamity never came.

Which makes me wonder … what technology do we hold dear today, and insist we could not live without, will a century from now seem as quaint as pneumatic tubes do today?

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 … (more…)

Finishing the February 20th issue of Entertainment Weekly, I glanced at the ad on the back cover, and was immediately puzzled. Wasn’t that a quote from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech delivered at the Sorbonne in 1910?

Cadillac wouldn’t just go ahead and use the quote without attribution, would it?

Cadillac would. (more…)

I always wince at those old-style comedians who joke about how much they hate their spouses and would rather be anywhere than with them. That “take my wife … please” kind of comedy has always rubbed me the wrong way, in part because I believe that if you really do have problems with your partner, it should stay between the two of you until it’s either solved or not. Mend it or end it, just don’t joke about it to me.

But it also bothers me because I think the reason some guys talk about their relationships that way—and this is sadder—is they’re afraid to make themselves seem vulnerable and weak by admitting, yes, they do love another person, and so instead joke about “the old ball and chain.”

Which is why I didn’t find the product advertised on the inside front cover of Top Love Stories #14 (1953) to be either funny or romantic. And yet the manufacturer thought it was both!

Jail-Jamas—with “genuine prison stripes” and a card that says “lose all hope ye who enter here”—are advertised as “romantic” and “sure to make a hit with love birds who have gone down the road to matrimony.”

For those who are slightly embarrassed that they’re in love, and so feel a need to mock that genuine emotion … perhaps. But for the rest of us, including the young women who probably made up most of the readers of that romance comic book … I don’t think so.

Not romantic. Not romantic at all.

The romance comic Top Love Stories #16 (February 1954) wants you to know that whatever your size, it’s the wrong size!

The first thing you see upon opening the issue is an ad on the inside front cover for Wate-On homogenized liquid, designed to make readers worry that they’re “skinny” and “scrawny” when instead they should have “firm, good-looking healthy flesh” and “extra pounds.”

Meanwhile, the last thing you see after reading the stories within is a back cover ad for Kelpidine chewing gum—with Hexitol—certain to make readers insecure that they have “ugly fatty bulges” rather than “that dreamed about silhouette.” (more…)