It’s been a while since we posted one of these, but when I stumbled across this vintage karate ad I knew immediately I had to share it. Even when it came out, you knew by looking at it that it was pretty much total crap - not even a 10 year old kid believed he’d achieve “complete self-defense mastery” in one day - that shit took at least a week! Still, that didn’t stop them from buying up ad space in every single Marvel comic created in the mid-seventies, though! The entire ad, in all it’s glory, is after the jump.

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Just a friendly public reminder that, as awesome as the Transformers are, they really never had much in the way of direct competition. Hard to believe the Gobots were ever popular enough to warrant a movie, much less product endorsement tie-ins. Really, the “grand prize” was more of a booby prize, and look; even the Quik rabbit didn’t want to be seen in the same ad with these losers.

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The fun has definitely come back to Threadless the last few months, beating back the joyless indy-art mindset that seemed to dominate the entries and chosen designs for a while there. This new shirt struck me as particularly cool, especially in light of this recent KFR post.

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This cool little spy pen (just like they use in A Man Called U.N.C.L.E.!) supposedly let you see through walls and somehow also doubled as a mini telescope. I never understood exactly how this sort of x-ray spec technology was supposed to work, but like any other kid I was always intrigued by it - did anyone out there ever actually buy this pen or the glasses? What was their gimmick?

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From the venerable Murray Roach comes this classic ad that Marvel would likely prefer to never think of again. Y’see, kids, back in the day, comic book artists didn’t get their original art back. For years they were cool with it, since they didn’t see any intinsic value in the original pages, but Kirby kind of did. He asked Marvel for his art, they said no, and years of namecalling (from Marvel towards The King) ensued. Marvel eventually gave in and returned the art they still had in their posession, creating another cottage industry with comic book art dealers and the like as a result, but before that happened, Marvel was publically shamed by various comic book companies and professionals. The ad below ran on the back cover of Eclipse comics in “celebration” of Marvel’s 25th year of publishing.

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Ever so slightly before my time, this ad for inflatable plastic pillows featuring the visages of all your favorite Marvel charcters is certianly indicative of a simplert time. For a while, it seemed that any cheap mass-producable product was marketed towards kids with Spider-Man, The Hulk or the Fantastic Four on them…I think I just described the summer of 2007 to you. So, I guess the real lesson to be learned by this Classic Comic Ad is that the more things change, etc.

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Man, I loved these ads as a kid. I had no idea who Jack Davis was at the time, but I immediately recognized the work of one of the better artists in Mad Magazine. There was also a vampire version of this ad, I believe, and I have vague recollections of a mummy as well, I think…

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Much like GRIT, I never, ever met anyone who actually bought into this whole Rip-Off’s thing. Unlike GRIT, I never had any desire to buy the damn things. Of course, that didn’t stop the company from buying up the back cover of numerous Marvel comics back in the mid-80s. And those ids always bothered me - there was something about them I simply didn’t trust…

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