#2571: Marvel Selects Spider-man #3 (2000)

So this is a weird one.

Marvel Selects was a pair of strange series published in 2000, one title dedicated to Spider-man and one to the Fantastic Four. The comics featured reprints of stories from the 1970s, which was not exactly the peak material in the runs of these characters. Both series ran only six issues, so it doesn’t seem like the idea was a success.

What is weird, though, is that this comic features ads that are not ads.

Our coding protocol addresses three types of ads: external ads that are sold to some company that is not the publisher (a film studio, a video game company, a food company); in-house ads that advertise other products from the publisher itself (subscriptions, other forthcoming titles, trade paperbacks), and public service announcements. What it doesn’t count are what this book has: reproductions of ads that ran in the original comic book that are marked at the bottom as no longer valid. That is to say, they are ads for companies that no longer exist.

So, what are they?

Not an ad.

We have a category for editorial content, and the little notices on the bottom seem like that could make them qualify, but it’s not really what we mean by that term. We have a category for activities like puzzles, but that also doesn’t seem to fit. We have one for title pages, but that’s a no.

There are two categories that seem close. The first is pin-ups, which are images meant to stand alone outside of a narrative, which these do. The other is behind-the-scenes material. If we would want to make a case that the comic is being meta-reflexive about its own publishing history (which, to be fair, it actually is!) then this category might bend enough to accommodate these pieces.

Frankly, I’m not sure where I fall on this question yet, though I lean towards pin-up. If you have an opinion, we’re all ears.

There is, of course, always the dreaded “other”, but we’d prefer not to have to do that….

0262: Skyman #4 (1948)

This week I'll be posting about some of our more recent acquisitions before they head to the shelving unit, so we'll be looking mostly at comics from the 1930s and 1940s. This is one of the least written about periods of the American comic book (at least among scholars), and is also an area that is most prone to generalization and assumption. There's a lot to see here.

I will admit that the first thing that caught my attention about this, the final issue of Skyman, was the boy with the Jughead hat. Having written Twelve-Cent Archie, I did some looking into that hat and its design origins in the early-1940s, so finding one here in the late-1940s was enough for me to set the comic book aside. But there is a lot going on here aside from that. "Clean Comics For Everyone" is a heck of a slogan if you know the history of comics reception during this period (Columbia also used that phrase on their flagship title, Big Shot Comics). More than that, however, I was struck by the Ogden Whitney signature right below the title.

One of the elements that we are coding for is cover credits. In the 2000s, these are spectacularly common (except among comics targeting young readers), and they are fairly common in the 1990s and even, a bit, in the 1980s. A lot of scholarship presumes them to be absent from the earliest comics, but our corpus isn't really showing that at all. Lev Gleason's comics, for example, mostly have them, and so do a pretty remarkable number of comic books from the 1930s - particularly those with comic strip reprints in them.

The Whitney credit here is a little bit more out of place. Whitney, who was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame a few years ago, co-created Skyman (a superhero with no powers other than wealth and a weird plane) with Gardner Fox, and his adventures ran in Big Shot Comics beginning in 1940. There were four Skyman special issues in 1941, 1942, 1947 and 1948 (this one). Whitney signed all four covers, and the third issue even has a "By Ogden Whitney" under the title, while this issue lost the "By" but otherwise looks the same. 

Similarly, all of the interior stories are signed by Whitney with a "By". The GCD doesn't credit him as the writer (they leave it an open question), but Columbia lets him imply he did the whole thing. Maybe he did? In terms of our project, it's not that relevant who wrote the stories, but the fact that an author is assigned to the work is important to us overall.

Columbia were a weird publisher that was in business from 1940 to 1949. We have a few issues of Big Shot Comics in the corpus, and a couple of other Columbia strip reprint titles. The publisher was never a big player, as their short life indicates. This book is somewhat anomalous for its dearth of ads - it contains only three, an in-house ad for Big Shot Comics on the inside front cover, a Charles Atlas ad on the inside back cover, and an ad for a combination cigarette lighter/flashlight/keychain on the back cover.

0198: Aviation Adventures and Model Building #17 (1947)

The Overstreet Guide refers to this one as "Half comics and half pictures", but that isn't strictly accurate. It's less than half comics, and the rest is mostly a mixture of advertising and model-building instructions. The instructions are really detailed. I'm pretty sure that I could use these to build a really interesting balsa wood airplane if I took this down to my local craft store.

Aviation Adventures and Model Building feels a lot more like a magazine with comics than it does a "traditional" comic book. Perhaps it is because the first page isn't a splash page or a story, but an ad. Not just any ad, an ad for Xacto knives. It seems weird to me that there was once a time when Xacto was a company that advertised, but there you have it.

The issue is filled with a series of very short comics stories, the most interesting of which is an ongoing series (this issue has the sixth chapter) that literally teaches how to fly: how to use the controls, and so on. I'm not sure who the audience for that would be, and it terrifies me to think that at one time you could learn to fly from what is essentially a children's comic. Unfortunately, you never would've learned to land, since the magazine was cancelled with this issue.

The most interesting ad is surely this one, for Pepsi Cola. If you know anything about American soft drink wars, you may know the name Walter Mack, the president of Pepsi who targeted black Americans directly in the 1940s. This ad, featuring Pepsi the Pepsi-Cola Cop, is not an example of that trend, but it may be an example of Pepsi's increasing reliance on niche-marketing during this decade. Definitely something to look into.