Charles Atlas Makes You Into A Man!

Probably the single longest running ad campaign in comic books was spearheaded by the one and only Mr. Charles Atlas. Angelo Siciliano was a scrawny Italian who moved to America and in the 1920s developed one of most spectacular exercise programs of all time that is still making money to this very day. After changing his name to Charles Atlas, former-wimp Angelo promoted the ever-living heck out of his revolutionary muscle building system he branded "Dynamic Tension" and reduced the population of 97-pound weaklings to near extinction, or at least that was Chuck's original intention. Being the former circus strongman that he was, Charles was regularly photographed in Tarzan shorts as the self-proclaimed World's Most Perfectly Developed Man. The Atlas ads were for a free illustrated book titled Everlasting Health And Strength that you could send away for, although the ad at first doesn't mention anything about how Atlas makes any profit from this. Many other fitness experts poo-pooed Atlas' advertisements saying he couldn't have achieved that physique without any training equipment, plus the claim that you can get that pumped up from just working out 15 minutes a day. The single ad most everyone remembers is a full-page with half of it being a comic strip where a gangly lad named Joe is at the beach with his bikini-clad girlfriend when a random bully makes fun of him for being skinny and then smacks him in the face. Joe sends away for Charles Atlas' free book and later heads back to the beach to punch the same bully right in front of a bunch of beach bunnies claiming that he's now a real he-man. There were variations on this theme in other ads trading in the beach setting for either at a fair or on a dance floor, but they all had some puny guy getting revenge on a random roughhouser. No matter the approach, Atlas' ads evolved into being the most recognized comic book inserts since the Golden Age, so much so that an entire musical number from Rocky Horror Picture Show is based on it where an alien transvestite doctor creates his own homemade muscle man. Charles Atlas' legacy had endured far beyond the point of its original intent even if it was an overblown comics hoax.

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