Tuthill told POP!, “I know it wasn’t over $25 bucks because I wouldn’t have bought it if it was. Here's the Warren Publishing ad that was featured in issues of Creepy and Eerie around the late sixties and early seventies. Steinberg told POP!, “As I recall, I know we got a certain amount of money in the office, and then we would send a notice to the monkey people with payment, whatever they charged, and then they would take care of shipping it.” For a few years in early Seventies, Florence Steinberg managed Captain Company - “Fabulous Flo” was Stan Lee’s infamous gal Friday in the heyday of Sixties’ Marvel. One of the best places to order squirrel monkeys was in the back pages of Warren magazines via James Warren’s Captain Company, a business that the comics publisher used to sell novelty products. Realistically, one can only imagine the face of outraged parents across the country when their children unexpectedly ordered these bundles of “joy” and “hilarity.” Had I been of age (or even alive), I would have purchased a squad of monkeys to be my loyal helpers in searching for the television remote, fetching cold sodas, brushing my teeth, writing my homework, and performing my altar boy duties. So for a reasonable amount of money, you could’ve roamed the neighborhood like Tarzan with your own personal Cheeta. Most of these advertisements were selling them for less than twenty dollars, plus the undisclosed fee for delivery. If you look closely at the ads in Marvel comics and Warren magazines during the late Sixties/early Seventies, you can easily spot the ones marketing the primates. But of all the animals that were ever sold in comics, if one were to be the ultimate purchase, it had to be the imported squirrel monkey, a native of South America and parts of Central America.Ī beautiful picture of a Squirrel Monkey at work by photographer Luc Viatour. These were far more fascinating than your average Mexican jumping beans, ant farms and the infamous Sea Monkeys. For myself, the most eye-catching ads were the ones selling live animals to kids: chameleons, baby raccoons, mice and other little critters. The old comics were like time capsules full of nifty artifacts that a prior generation could’ve purchased. In the era before the rise of mainstream internet and the invasion of proper trade collections, true comic readers had to buy vintage back issues to read the classics and complete their title runs. ![]() Back in the day, all the answers to life’s problems were in the pages of a comic book. In some ways, the entertaining comic ads brought back to life the feel of the classic advertisements featuring snake oil medicine, over-the-top novelties and magic lucky bracelets.įor a dollar bill, the Plant World Company would sell you the bulbs, growing soil, and instructions to plant your very own eerie army of vicious Venus Fly Traps! For a fist full of dollars, you could wow your classmates with over a million dollars worth of vintage gold bank notes from The Fun House ad! For a few dollars more, you could serenade the neighborhood girls by learning to play the guitar in a mere seven days! Beat the crap out of your bullies with nunchaku sticks for $7.95! And if you needed to make some extra change to buy all this goodness, there was usually a want ad calling for good boys and girls to sell “Grit” newspapers to their parents, their relatives, their friends’ parents and every person in the white pages of the telephone book. Thus comic books became common ground for people searching for the sensational and those wanting to sell it to them. From the Golden Age to the Eighties, many small novelty companies realized that they could specifically reach youngsters, their target market, through small, cheap ads in comic pamphlets. ![]() Now if all these of products worked, one could conceivably become a real-life superhero and a hit with the ladies. Whatever a naive kid might conjure in his wild imagination could be had for a price in the pages of a comic book: awesome magic tricks, increased musculature, powerful intellect, slam dunk basketballs and even a dose of self-confidence. Little did we know that besides the power-packed stories there would be these wonderful advertisements for all sorts of fascinating, eccentric goodies. In the beginning, we comic book aficionados came upon these four-colored wonders looking for something that tickled our imagination for our pocket full of coins.
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