Stupid Comics

One comic book ad that struck fear in the hearts of male readers everywhere was by Ward Laboratories, Inc. During the 1950s, they ran a series of advertisements that told you to "save your hair" with one of them looking like something right out of horror movie. Ward had done ads before that did a close-up hair-destroying germs, but this particular one had a huge monstrous hand reaching through the several microscopic shots and reaching for a poor middle-aged man's head who appears to be scared out of his skull. The real sting here is the lightning bolts striking the man's top saying that the mere touch of this germ-infested zombie hand would cause head odors, dandruff, and scalp itch, as if this would happen in real life. The chances of you coming across an undead appendage in the wild with the sole purpose of giving you fallen hair are pretty thin. The fact that these ads were made up for a kid's publication but were aimed at older men is confounding as if the ad...

Most everyone has seen the We Can Do It poster of Rosie the Riveter, but two years before J. Howard Miller did that famous painting, the comic book character Pat Patriot probably served as the idea prototype. Lev Gleason Publications started the story in the pages of Issue #2 of the original Daredevil comics in 1941 created by the combined talents of Charles Biro and Bob Wood who both popularized the genre of crime comics. Unlike most superheroines of the time, Patricia Patrios wasn't a bored debutante who fought crime but a genuine working girl starting off on a military assembly line that moonlighted as an actress playing a female Uncle Sam (or Aunt Sam) wearing an American flag outfit. One night after a performance while she was still in costume, she stops a plot by her factory boss who was selling airplane parts to the Axis powers. From this point on, she was given the professional name of Pat Patriot and gets into one scrape after the other as both a government mascot and spok...

Dean Ross Piano Studios had been printing their advance course booklets for a while in the 40s, but when the 50s crawled along they really amped up their game by using comics to brainwash youngsters into thinking that learning to play piano is the only thing that can save you from a life of social exile. These comic ads promoted their ever so special patented Automatic Chord Selector which was really just a cut-out piece of paper that acts as a finger guide for anyone wanting to tickle the ivories. For some reason, nearly every other middle-class home had a piano taking up an immense amount of space during the mid-20th Century, probably because there wasn't much on TV at the time, so pianos were the nexus of all get-togethers. Dean Ross devised a deceptive ploy in their ad's short comic about a girl named Mary fretting herself into near catatonic state just because her friend Betty is now an irresistible man-magnet only due to the meager skills she learned from Dean Ross. At lu...

In 1953, the craze of 3D comics had publishers thinking that this was going to be the next evolution in comics, but it turned out to be just a passing fad. However, Harvey Comics decided to create the first stereoscopic superhero, Captain 3D, and they called in comic book royalty to work on it. Captain America creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon handled the story, with Kirby doing all the art along with Mort Meskin and Steve Ditko in his first ever professional superhero comic. The comic came with two pairs of 3D glasses, but this trend didn't pan out so Harvey only did a single issue. Captain 3D had one of the gaudiest superhero uniforms ever made outside of Canada's Polka-Dot Pirate with his striped leggings, red buccaneer boots, dorky helmet and with a big "3D" emblem over the chest, he seemed more like a corporate mascot than a legit hero. The idea behind the character was to have a superhero who could literally leap off the page into the real world, although only i...

Do you want to get World War 3 with ants? Because this is how you get it! Youthful Magazines' Captain Science had a few stand-alone sci-fi tales during its 7-issue run, one of which is more of an alien invasion than an actual world war. Starting out in 1952, an explosion in Earth's atmosphere has ants raining down onto the planet who all grew to giant size after eating. Soon the entire globe is infested with colossal creepy crawlers, and entomologist Prof. Tom Leigh realizes the imminent danger, so he gathers a co-ed group of scientists to seal themselves in a university lab and try to find a solution to the ant-mageddon. The his/hers crew realize they don't have enough supplies to last before they can find a resolution to the big bugs, so one of them creates a plastic formula that embalms anyone into suspended animation, so they spend the next several decades sealed away with only two scientists at a time working on the ultimate ant eliminator. Cut ahead to 2052 and Tom is...

Joe Weider was a bodybuilder from Canada who started the International Federation Of Body Builders with his brother Ben, and founded the Mr. Universe contest, not to mention he got hitched to Betty Brosmer who was a pinup girl with the nearly impossible proportions of 38-18-36. He also published several magazines like Flex, Shape, and Men's Fitness, although his major claim to fame was his infamous comic book ads that ran all the way from the Golden Age up into modern times. One of the latter ads got Weider into trouble because he roped a young Arnold Schwarzenegger into being the poster boy for his faulty Weider Formula supplements which didn't produce the results it boasted about. Another ad has a scrawny boy asking his muscular friend Rocky about how to attract bikini girls on the beach simply by getting the Weider training booklet. However, one of the most offensive ones boasted that anyone who followed his flag would turn into a raging psychopath wanting to pick fights wit...