The comics offered diversions from daily life. They offered new heroes and antiheroes, spoke new languages and dialects, and fueled the imagination in ways unequaled by any other mass form. “The readership of the comics is one of the amazing phenomena of our contemporary society … ,” wrote advertising analyst Harvey Zorbaugh. “Readership surveys indicate that every week more than sixty million adult men and women pore over the Sunday comic supplement.” Everyone identified with comic characters—kids dressed like Buster Brown and parents named their babies Snookums after the character in The Newlyweds. Comic characters were like real people. In the late 1920s and 1930s, as comics became less comical and more dramatic (e.g., Mary Worth), they also hit hard and hit home on the basic themes of human nature.
The comic strip has always been a democratic form. Its word/image construction invites easy access and is, therefore, an ideal vehicle for promoting ideas. Not surprisingly, during the 1930s—and lasting well into the 1950s—the comic strip was used to sell products as diverse as vegetable shortening, laundry detergent, acne medicine, breakfast cereal, light bulbs, toothpaste, towels, and automobiles. A few of the ads were penned by the masters themselves, but most were produced by anonymous copyists or acolytes working in advertising bullpens and art-service studios. The quality ranged from primitive comics to highly polished renderings to panels of photographs with speech balloons. Although the majority of the texts were written by hack copywriters, some were entertaining. Who can forget the famous Charles Atlas body-building ads where a weakling is humiliated, loses the girl, eats sand, and ultimately takes the Atlas course and gets revenge?
No one knows who conceived the first comic strip ad, but the comic strip was ignored by advertisers for almost three decades. Only after the pollster George Gallup released a report in 1930, at the height of the Great Depression, that ninety percent of all Americans read the comics and comic pages, did advertisers begin to use the form. In 1935 M. C. Gaines, manager of the color printing department of the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, wrote in PM magazine: “As a result of [the] discovery that the comics enjoy the widest appeal of all newspaper features, it is estimated that close to $1 billion worth of space has been filled with advertising of the comic strip type… . Color comic advertising has proven so profitable that, in the opinion of one of the country’s foremost research authorities, there is a possibility that newspapers will be forced to print comics in color several times a week.”
Evidence of the appeal of comic strip advertising was significant. In 1932, six months after initiating a comics advertising campaign to boost failing sales of its Grape Nuts cereal, General Foods announced an unprecedented surge in profits. Soon afterward, J. Walter Thompson’s advertising agents requested comic strip ads for all their accounts, regardless of the appropriateness. The 1930s became known in advertising circles as “the balloon talk period.” In a contemporary advertising trade journal a columnist wrote: “Psychologically the use of the comic technique is sound … Pictures [are] one of the best attention getting devices… . Simple human interest material, based on basic wants, holds interest and the brevity with which the story must be told [says] the reader is not asked to concentrate too long to get the story.” Moreover, wrote Roland Marchand in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920–40 (University of California Press, 1985), comic strip formats, like radio commercials, gave print advertisements a time dimension. Viewers also identified with the true story melodramas and real people testimonials so common in strips. No wonder advertisers hopped on the soap opera bandwagon when the living comic strip premiered in the mid-1930s.
To introduce the section on comic strip advertising in the Fourteenth Annual of Advertising Art (1935) the editor wrote that this new form “has been the complete overthrow of the government of advertising by conventional rule. With the aplomb of Ignatz Mouse tossing a brick at Krazy Kat, continuity and comic strips have impudently tossed aside advertising tradition, become legitimate and frequently astonishingly effective expressions…”
Despite mass appeal and financial success, critics railed against comics, and serious advertising men deplored the comics’ frivolity, childish escape, and otherwise degraded standards. Certain advertisers believed that the comic strip craze marked the nadir of an honorable profession, a catering to mindlessness. Despite advancements in advertising media, the Great Depression ultimately caused advertisers to try any scheme to sell their wares. “The cumulative effect of a decade of radio had crushed the vision of advertising as a broad educational force that would lift consumers to higher aesthetic tastes and intellectual pursuits,” wrote Roland Marchard.
The critics could not, however, squelch the comics frenzy and were forced into the realization that the American people were not interested in high-brow advertising techniques. The consumer wanted a message that could be quickly and easily understood. The comic strip may have erred on the side of puerility, but until the mid-1950s, when television stole its thunder, comic strip ads were a mainstay of American advertising.
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Index
Bold page numbers indicate images, and works by particular designers.
NUMBERS
9/11 attacks, 18
127 John Street, 197
505th Airborne Division, 19
2001: A Space Odyssey, 206
A
Aarons, Slim, 64
Abbe, Dorothy, 254, 255
Abbott, Berenice, 60, 94
ABC, 154, 201
ABC des Nationalsozialismus (Rosten), 232
About U.S., 152–53, 152, 153
Academie Moderne, 194
Academy Pictures, 205
Accent on America (Armitage), 149
AD, 44–45, 45
Addams Family: Family Values, 206
Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division (Lissitzky), 135–36
AD Gallery, 68–69
advertising
Anderson, 266–67
CBS, 154–55
comic strip, 285–87, 286, 287
Federico, 155–56
Ferro, 205
film, 158–59, 205–6
futurist, 146
General Dynamics, 283–84, 284
Kauffer, 196
Priester Match poster, 273–75
propaganda and, 17
racial stereotypes in, 240–42
Restaurant Florent, 207–8
show cards, 271–72, 271, 272
Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920-40 (March and), 286
AEG (Allgemeine Elecktric itäts-Gesellschaft), 191, 193
Agel, Jerome, 219
Age of the Auto, The (Beall), 152, 152
Agha, M.F., 45, 65, 66, 256
AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), 136, 148, 165, 243–46
Air France, 257
AIZ (Arbeiter Illustierte Zeitung), 26, 50, 51
Akzidenz, 136
Akzidenz Grotesk, 198
Alain-Fournier, Henri, 57
Albers, Josef, 174, 178
album covers
Bacon, 170, 172
Cheap Thrills, 278–280, 279
de Harak, 198
Sagmeister, 244, 246
Steinweiss, 276–77, 276
Aldermaston Easter Peace Walk, 27
Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman (Kazanjian and Tompkins), 65
Alfabeteire (Munari), 137
Alfred A. Knopf, 169, 170, 263
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 134
Allen, Deborah, 61
Allen, Tom, 72
Allen, Woody, 82
Allgemeine Elecktricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), 191, 193
Alliance Graphique, 257
Alpert, Max, 52
alternative publishing, 25
American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), 136, 148, 165, 243–46
American Opinion, 28
American Type Foundry (ATF), 118
Amerika (Gorey cover), 55, 57
Amphigorey (Gorey), 58
Anatomy of a Murder, 159
Anchor Books, 55–58, 163
And Babies? Yes Babies! (Chwast), 31
Anderson, Charles Spencer, 266–67, 267
Anderson, Gail, 13
Angelfood McSpade, 86, 87
Angels in America, 211
animation, 205
“Années ‘25’ Les,” 253
Another Mother for Peace, 31
anti-propaganda, 18, 18
antiwar movement, 27–28, 31, 75, 80
Antupit, Sam, 72–73
Apollinaire, 183
Apple Computer Company, 201
Arbeiter Fotograf, Der, 51
Arbeiter Illustierte Zeitun
g (AIZ), 26, 50, 51
area code, 160
Arens, Egmond, 237
Arisman, Marshall, 102
Armitage, Merle, 149–151, 149, 281
Armory Show, 194
Armour Meat Company, 240
art nouveau, 42–43, 259–260
“Art of Advertising, The” (Depero), 146
Art of Dramatic Writing, 166
Artone, 259–260
arts and crafts movement, 42, 43, 264
Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 44, 253
Art Student’s League, 169, 220
Ashkenazi, 138
Astor Place, 213
Atelier Hachette/Massin, 185
ATF (American Type Foundry), 118
Atget, Eugène, 66
Atlas, Charles, 285
Atlas Comics, 204
atomic bomb, 32
atomic power, 283–84
“Atoms for Peace” (Nitsche), 283
Aunt Jemima, 240
Austen, Eric, 27
Avante Garde (typeface), 121, 129
Avant Garde (periodical), 74–75, 74
B
Babar the Elephant, 50, 137
Baby Teeth, 133, 200
Bacon, Paul, 168–172, 169, 185, 261
Bain, Peter, 108, 109
Bald Soprano, The (Massin), 182–83, 184, 185
“Ball and Chain” (Big Brother and the Holding Company), 278
Ballet Russe, 149
“Ball in the Bung Hole, A” (Wilson), 90
Bamag and Henckels, 193
Bananas (film), 82
Band, The, 280
Barnbrook, Jonathan, 109, 131
Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry (BB&S), 118, 119
Barnum and Bailey, 19
Bartók, Béla, 277
Baseline, 127
Baskerville, 133
Baskerville Old Face, 185
Bass, Saul, 158–59, 159, 168, 204
Bauhaus, 54, 110–11, 111, 178, 190
Bayer, Herbert, 44, 45, 149, 271, 281
Bazaar. see Harper’s Bazaar
BB&S (Barnhart Brothers & Spindler Type Foundry), 118, 119
Beach Culture, 102–3, 103
Beall, Lester
Age of the Auto, The, 152, 152, 153
Federico and, 156
Fiore and, 220
International Paper, 231
Lustig and, 165
PM, 45
Scope, 69
Beardsley, Aubrey, 281
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