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"The Insult That Made A Man Out of Mac!" September, 1999

I'm actually loathe to reprint this one on the Web, because I don't have time at the moment to go and grab all the great graphics that originally went with this article. In fact, this article may have been the first time I got a compliment about a Fanboy from someone other than Larry or Brian. As I recall, a guy grinned at me and said, "Wow, where'd you get the great pictures of these ads? These are great."

Okay, so it wasn't a compliment about the writing. I'll take what I can get...

Fanboy Rampage By Jeff Lester

We've all got our theories, let's face it. As the circulation of once-beloved comic books sinks lower and lower and fingers point back and forth, everyone's got an idea as to why. Not enough crossover with other media events, such as movies, tv shows and video games, some say. Others say there's too much crossover with those brain-dead big money events, diluting comics' unique product. Some point the fingers at comics retailers, while others point at the late shipping and no-return arrangements of the companies as slowly leaching away retailers' vitality. Too many big events, some say while others say we need more: let's break Batman's pelvis, back and both thumbs, and burn down Gotham City, and have the Joker marry Barbara Gordon while giving Commissioner Gordon Superman's powers, reintroduce Ace the Bat-hound and, oh yeah, replace Alfred with the new "Bat-Mite," a young super-intelligent videogame playing butler's apprentice who's "totally extreme" and has a mountain bike that can ride up and down the sides of buildings (and we have to do all this with an air of gritty seriousness because, after all, this is Batman).

Me, I figured it out just last week while digging through an old pile of comic books. There's a very simple reason why comic books aren't as popular, and it's not the creators, the companies, or the events.

It's the ads.

Comic book ads these days suck, in no small part because they're all carefully slanted to the demographic of the book. The ads in Transmet are for movies, TV shows and video games. The ads in Batman Adventures are for cereals, candy and video games. The ads in Contest of Champions II are for candy, video games and comics at liquidation prices (no, really). To say nothing of the copious in-house advertising in all of them. But over twenty-five years ago, there was no segregation by desired market, and a strange sour mash of advertising was distilled, appealing to the hyper-and-sub literate, the gullible and the savvy, the young and the desperately old.

Why, for $1.69 you could order Tank Trap, the complete game, with 64 combat men, a huge battlefield and 6 exploding tanks! Or Supreme Command, with 3 square feet of beautifully colored plastic, 4 aircraft carriers and, best of all, "16 arrogant German units!" Then, after you tired of playing with army men, you could enter a drafting class. That's right: "Coast-to-Coast Shortage of Trained Draftsmen Opens Thousands of Big Salary Jobs for Beginners!" I haven't even gotten to the classics; the X-Ray Specs, the Insult That Made a Man out of Mac, that scary picture of a young Jeffrey Dahmer lookalike selling Grit for extra money, or, my favorite, the utterly insane, beautiful dream of an underwater Utopia that was the theme of every Sea Monkeys ad. You could flip through any comic book and be treated to a phantasmagoria of Monster Ghosts, burly musclemen, invaluable pennies, karate dummies, quick-change artists and determined students triumphing over adversity. And I repeat, THESE WERE ONLY THE ADS. The comic book writers and artists had to work really hard to keep the reader's attention on the story. And, as time went on, the lines blurred with more ads being told in short one page comic adventures, and more and more comic books being made about toys. The other day I picked up package of Hostess cupcakes, and I had to ask myself: does my addiction to Hostess products come from a deprived childhood, or from the three or so years of having the Marvel and DC superheroes shill them to me in those amazing one page adventures? (Probably a bit of both, I'm sure.)

Now, by contrast, we have those little scaggy Three Musketeer guys looking like refugees from a Rankin-Bass cartoon in ads that look like movie posters. Movie posters? Yo, this is a comic book, you chocolatey little bastards!

And why is it that video games are almost always advertised in two-page spreads? Do you guys have the world's most spoiled marketing department or what? A close-up photo of a smoking skull, two game screen shots and fifty words of gibberish comprised of short punchy tag lines like "Failing isn't an option. Only fighting." Hey, if I wanted catchphrases, overly arty close-ups and a paucity of coherence, I'd read an Image Comic. Do you know what the old guys could sell you in two full pages? A diet plan, a remote control ghost, a correspondence course in accounting, 5 different comic book mail order catalogues, a cartooning course, "keep on trucking" stickers, a locksmith course, and the chance to have my poems set to music.

Also, since just about every comic professional blames video games on the collapse of the market in the '90s, why don't we just stop taking ads for them? I'm sure there's a few correspondence schools out there. And where are the action figure advertisements? Outside of a McFarlane comic book, you never see ads for action figures, and action figures are pretty cool now, targeted for older consumers, filled with neat action features, etc., etc. Back in the day, all we had were lame figures like Big Jim and, get this, Eagle Eye GI Joe who was able to battle off invaders merely because he could move his eyes from side to side (no, really). And then there was the king of the back covers, Evel Knievel. I think in the first Evel Knievel ad, they showed him jumping an old shoe or something, that's how lame Evel Knievel and his stunt cycle were. But he sold like gangbusters and soon he had his own stunt stadium, scramble van, stunt and crash car and canyon sky cycle. Of course, there was still a certain lack of authenticity as the Evel action figure was rubber on a wire frame so it was impossible to break every bone in his body (I settled for giving Evel third degree burns).

So, comic book publishers, look back towards those ugly days of yesteryear. Never underestimate the power of gaudy advertising, that's what I have to say. Because that stuff, believe it or not, has a life of its own. And if you don't believe me, check out the success of Ebay, where I just got burned by a Idaho dealer who was supposed to sell me two baboons and a working artificial uterus. It's no package of sea monkeys, but I'll take what I can get.

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