Save Your Hair!

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 execs were convinced that only children or stupid adults bother reading comics, so throwing in this nightmare fuel about going bald would be a sure-fire way to attract grown men afraid of being mistaken for Kojak. This and the boast that nothing known to modern science can help you like Ward's Formula, and if you don't use it, you'll eventually go bald and your life is figuratively over when it does. It's hard to say what the suicide rate was for men in the 50s who ended it all due to hair loss, but this bloodcurdling ad probably saved the lives of thousands of gullible grown-ups who just happened to occasionally breeze through kid's comics.