From the back of "Ghost Manor" #55, (Charlton, March 1981) comes this horribly printed ad for a "Warrior's Battlejacket." Look familiar? Note the pharaonic space helmet the boy is holding. And yet the phrase "Battlestar Galactica" appears nowhere in the advertisement. And believe it or not, this is far from the sleaziest ad in this comic. As you'll soon see.
Apparently the little girl is busy transcending this plane of existance and morphing into an energy being. She gets that from her mom's side of the family, I guess. When folks see the husband strolling arm-in-arm with his brightly glowing, near-featureless wife, the other fellas jab one another and say, "Man, how'd a loser like him score... um, whatever the hell that thing is?" And then the wife would overhear them and fold space into a tesaract in order to reach inside their skulls and reduce their brains to a frothy, mousse-like consistency. As for the husband? Well, the sex is mind-blowing. Instead of a bed, they do the nasty directly on one of those monolith thingies from "2001: A Space Odyssey." Unfortunately, the radiation level is so high that his junk has sprouted a tiny, scowling face and what appear to be several miniature narwhals' tusks.
According to the ad, "The Warrior's Battlejacket can be worn practically anywhere" (that you'd like a stranger to kick you in the groin). But what if you don't want the Warrior's Battlejacket? What if you'd rather have a girlfriend? How could the ads in "Ghost Manor" #55 help you with that endeavor?
Well, there's always mind control.
Or if that's not to your liking, maybe you'd like to try mind control.
Or even just good, simple, old-fashioned MIND CONTROL!
JESUS F**KING CHRIST! No wonder Charlton stopped publishing comics! All their customers were in prison! And I'm sure the prison psychiatrists wouldn't let them have any comics. Not Charlton comics, anyway. I'm guessing that towards the end, there, if you sent in a subscription form to Charlton Comics? It was automatically forwarded to the FBI. Nowadays there'd be laws requiring a Charlton reader to go door-to-door in their neighborhoods just to let everyone else know who was living amongst them.
And then they'd burn his house to the ground.
4 comments:
Gah! These ads induce a phantasmagoria that blurs them together until one becomes convinced that those supposedly snappy faux-Galactica jackets become the unifying garb of the coming mind-control cult! Scientology is just a front for these guys--note how they innocently suggest that you can wear them "practically anywhere"--and how casually "battling alien forms from another world" is slipped in with parties and school!! The OMNI-COSMIC OVERLORDS want to make you LOVE THEM!!! So they can usurp control of the earth to prepare for the coming alien HOLOCAUST!!!! THE WHOLE FAMILY MUST BE OUTFITTED FOR THIS BATTLE!!!!!
Where am I?!
Speaking of Charlton's advertisers being in prison, I recall reading a passage in Joe Simon's "The Comic Book Makers" that practicaly came out and said, "Charlton Comics is run by the Mob!" I've never read about that anywhere else, but Joe Simon does seem to have a pretty good memory...
Here's that bit from Joe Simon's book, which apparently has been redesigned since I bought my copy. Good thing, too, coz mine looks like it was laid out by a 12-year-old.
Chawunky: I'm glad I wasn't the only one who felt that way! It was just so weird and depressing to find all these ads for mind control in the same comic book. The jacket ad also ran in "Twilight Zone Magazine" around that time but of course the printing was better and the females in the picture actually had, y'know, faces.
Phillip: I'll be darned! I'm trying to imagine the Soprano mob doing their business in the back of a comics publisher instead of a strip club. All those fat guys in jogging suits and gold chains, smoking cigars and arguing about the latest plot developments in "Captain Atom" -- it's barely distinguishable from your average comic book store.
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