CATFIGHT! Girl fights in romance comics

I may have actually bought some of these, or one, back in the '60s, but only so my brother Arthur and I could make terrible fun of them. It wasn't hard to do. Never mind the sociological significance of these things. They're FUN, and that's all I care about at this point! The "catfight" scenes could not be cropped exactly to match the others (perfect squares), so I had to fiddle around with them a bit on white backgrounds, but it was worth it, they are just SO cool. The "jailbird" one is a favorite, as are the "nurse" specialties (nurses being especially hot). One thing I didn't realize - and this is illustrated in a couple of the pictures - some of these comics were done in duplicate for two different markets: white and black. It's eerie to see the exact same backgrounds, clothing, captions, etc., but with women of different races. 

Those issues are, of course, completely settled in 2016. Aren't they? We honestly thought we had fixed it once and for all, and things would only get better. NEVER did I EVER hear so much about racial hatred and violence and murder and strife back then, during the height of civil rights fever. It's worse now, much worse. This is but one of the things I must contemplate as I keep on chugging and blogging. As W. H. Auden put it: "Life remains a blessing/although you cannot bless."

Untruth in advertising: the Sea Monkeys conspiracy

I'm not sure what this is - at first it looked sort of like a weird Christmas ornament full of mythological creatures. gryphons or gorgons or whatever. But then I saw the resemblance to the classic old Sea Monkeys comic book ad. Same riotous creatures, partying their little faces off. Here, dancing the cha-cha.  I think you are meant to wear this glass globe around your neck, meaning the multi-legged creatures would have to hatch inside it. Be born, live on their sustaining sludge mixture, and die. But why are they GREEN?

Everyone knows, of course, that it's false, that they're really flesh-coloured, and speak perfect English. 

I don't remember Sea Monkeys being advertised on television, but they must have been, because I found a slew of bizarre old ads on YouTube.

As the 1980s wore on, truth in advertising won out. The little bastards aren't green OR flesh-coloured, but mucky, slimy beige. At least you knew what you were getting. Though people still want them, and spend money on them today. They're more of a science experiment than a pet.  My brother raised amoebae and paramecia in his bedroom, feeding them on a seething, fermenting solution of water and Brewer's yeast. The advantage of these little slimers is that you can actually SEE them.

Why is a chimp advertising Sea Monkeys? Maybe this one was snagged from that old Red Rose Tea ad.

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Hype and hard rubber

Since I like to do things bass-ackwards, I'll spoil the

surprise right off the top. This is what you got.

When you sent away for them.

They came in one of these-here things.

A brown cardboard box with a suspicious rattle.

Close-up, they appeared larval, like this thing.

Looks a bit like the Elephant Man with a hat on.

It was this thing, see, this ad, this - didn't you used to read comic books, or what? How old are you? All right. I DO remember this ad, though since I didn't like dolls to begin with, I never sent away for them. Plus I could never scrape together a whole dollar anyway. My allowance always went on things like Lik-M-Ade, wax lips with red syrup in them and those sherbet fountains, the powdered stuff you sucked up with a liquorice straw. Once I bought a Hercules ring modelled after the Trans-Lux cartoons, but it broke the first day.

But to get back to these things, these 100 Dolls for a Dollar. I was suspicious. Just what were they talking about? What the hell was "Lilliputian cuteness"? (Jonathan Swift might have had a problem with that.) Was this just another Sea Monkey caper, another X-Ray Specs con? Another Grog Grows Own Tail? How many little girls were they disappointing, anyway - sending in their damp crumpled dollar bills in eager anticipation - only to get something that wouldn't caper, spec or grow?

As with the mind-boggling sex manual I just translated, I will attempt to make the grainy type from 50 years ago more decipherable:

100 Little Dolls all for $1.00

100 Dolls made of genuine styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber only $1 for entire set. You get BABY DOLLS, NURSE DOLLS, DANCING DOLLS, FOREIGN DOLLS, CLOWN DOLLS, COWBOY DOLLS, BRIDE DOLLS, and many more in Lilliputian cuteness. And made not of paper or rags but of STYRENE plastic and hard synthetic rubber. If you don't go wild over them your money will be promptly refunded. Send $1.00 plus 25 cents for postage and handling for each set of 100 Dolls you order to: 100 Doll Co., Dept. 315, 285 Market St., P. O. Box 90, Newark, N. J.

People still have them, obviously, as these photos illustrate (and don't they just look like boxes full of dead insects?), and I would imagine that  a complete set of 100 might fetch a handsome price on eBay or Craigslist, but what the hell would you DO with them? For that matter, what did little girls do back then when they received these rattling toothpicks, looking something like those plastic things you stick birthday candles into?

The fact that they seemed to come in two colors is confusing. The pink is no more fleshlike than the sickly Chee-toh orange.

But wait! Though it looks almost the same, THIS ad has completely different copy. It's effusive, it's gushing, it's pure Madison Avenue in the '60s: Peggy Olsen might have written it during her coffee break with her feet up on her desk, chewing Wrigley's spearmint gum:

Don’t shake your head in disbelief! This is TRUE! For only 1 PENNY EACH you can give that little girl the most thrilling present of her life. This set of ONE HUNDRED DOLLS for only $1 – 1 penny A PIECE!

 Baby Dolls – Nurse Dolls – Dancing Dolls

Costume Dolls – Ballerina Dolls – Mexican Dolls

Indian Dolls – Clown Dolls – Cowboy Dolls

Bride Dolls – Groom Dolls – and many more.

 The wonder of this unprecedented offer is that every doll is made from beautiful high-quality Styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber. You get BABY DOLLS, NURSE DOLLS, DANCING DOLLS, FOREIGN DOLLS, CLOWN DOLLS, COWBOY DOLLS, BRIDE DOLLS and many more in Lilliputian cuteness. Your daughter or your niece or the cute child next door will love you for this gift. She will play with them for months and not grow weary of them. What a family for a little girl! Just think of it – 100 exquisite little dolls – in beautiful high-impact styrene plastic and hard synthetic rubber at this unbelievable price!

So fill out the coupon below. Order as many sets as you have little girls to give them to. Enclose $1 for each 100 doll set you order. And even at this amazing bargain you take no risk. If you don’t go absolutely wild over this bargain, just send the Dolls back and we will promptly refund your money.

(But don't go away, there’s more – to the ad, I mean! This freakin’ thing goes on forever.)

Our Guarantee     HERE IS WHAT THESE DOLLS ARE MADE OF

People seeing our ad, and not believing we can give such value, write us to ask what our 100 Dolls are made of. “Are they paper dolls, or rag dolls?” they ask. NEITHER! Each and every one of our 100 dolls is made of GENUINE STYRENE and SYNTHETIC RUBBER, expensively molded in true dimension – Height – Width – Depth! Every doll has come out of an individual mold, manufactured out of high-impact styrene to resist breakage, and is life-like in its proportions. They are truly delightful dolls!

How many times can you read the word "styrene" without puking? These people were obsessed with it. And all that hard rubber makes me worry. If these dolls had been a little less Lilliputian, if they had been, say, life-sized, think of the sin they might have spawned. But then they wouldn't have fit into that little brown box, would they?

And just what happened to the 100 Doll Company in Newark, New Jersey? Is it still there? Why did they only manufacture one thing? What sort of dolls would they be turning out in 2012: the kind that appear on TLC shows like My Strange Obsession?

Life slides me into tender melancholy, virtually daily, because I always think it was Better Back Then, more magical. It probably wasn't - I couldn't wait to grow up and get the hell away from school and my parents - but such is the power of nostalgia, a word that literally means "Don Draper pitching bullshit to a bunch of Kodak executives".

To be fair to the 100 Dolls Company, and to clarify any residual confusion, we should define Lilliputian once and for all.

Noun 1. lilliputian - a very small person (resembling a Lilliputian)
small person - a person of below average size

2. Lilliputian - a 6-inch tall inhabitant of Lilliput in a novel by Jonathan Swift Adj. 3. Lilliputian - tiny; relating to or characteristic of the imaginary country of Lilliput; "the Lilliputian population"
3. lilliputian - very small; "diminutive in stature"; "a lilliputian chest of drawers"; "her petite figure"; "tiny feet"; "the flyspeck nation of Bahrain moved toward democracy"

bantam, diminutive, flyspeck, midget, petite, tiny

little, small - limited or below average in number or quantity or magnitude or extent; "a little dining room"; "a little house"; "a small car"; "a little (or small) group"

3. lilliputian - (informal) small and of little importance; "a fiddling sum of money"; "a footling gesture"; "our worries are lilliputian compared with those of countries that are at war"; "a little (or small) matter"; "a dispute over niggling details"; "limited to petty enterprises"; "piffling efforts"; "giving a police officer a free meal may be against the law, but it seems to be a picayune infraction"

fiddling, footling, niggling, picayune, piddling, piffling, trivial, petty, little

colloquialism - a colloquial expression; characteristic of spoken or written communication that seeks to imitate informal speech

unimportant - not important; "a relatively unimportant feature of the system"; "the question seems unimportant"

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Sex in a can (or, the Secret of Married Love)

After yesterday's extremely depressing fiction, which I only left up because I am sure nobody will want to read it, let's once again return to the land of Ha, Ha, Ha.

Every once in a while I dig one of these up: magazine ads that, while they seemed unremarkable then, now strike us as either ludicrous or downright dangerous.  Many of them originally appeared in vintage comic books - OK, vintage NOW, but then they were brand new, and pretty hot stuff, let me tell you.

As a kid, I wanted to send away for "100 Dolls for $1", "Grog Grows Own Tail", onion gum ("tastes like. . . like. . . onions! It's too funny!"), and the little monkey who sat in a teacup and plaintively asked, "Will you give me a home?" I never had enough saved up to send away for anything, I didn't have American money, plus for some reason I thought my parents wouldn't like me doing it (in particular the monkey).

But these ads still hold power and sway over me. Some of these go much farther back than the early '60s versions I saw when we stayed at the cottage in the summer and my brother and I read the Jimmy Olsen Annual.

Jimmy Olsen was nearly as potent as the sand, the lapping lake, the bullfrogs, and all the magic of being let off the leash for a couple of weeks every year. We consumed him eagerly, along with burnt marshmallows and enormous porterhouse steaks eaten with practically no vegetables.

I remember going to the back of the comic book first. Strange child, I was. "Look at this. Onion gum. I'm going to get it."

There are so many of these ads, hundreds, thousands, that I finally had to pick a general category: Health and Wellbeing. These include some very ancient remedies that would probably send you to the morgue if you actually tried them.

 

 

What startles me is that nobody saw anything wrong with this.

 

 

 

Why does he have a giant shrimp behind his head (or is that the cure)?

 

Three guesses who this steroid-inflated hunk is. (Hint: he had an illegitimate child with his maid, and his initials are M. U. D.)

I'm happy for them. (But what's the Lard Information Council?)

 

 #1 Cure for obesity:  cigarettes!

There's a disgusting story - sorry, I just have to tell you this - claiming that opera superstar Maria Callas discovered this painless reducing method and lost a ton of weight, but one day when she was sitting in the bathtub, something green and slimy began to "emerge". That's all I want to tell you.

.

 

 

 

 

Ball cozy. Purpose unknown.

                                                                

 

Note they call it "periodic pain", which must have something to do with the Periodic Table of Elements. There's a version of this ad still on TV: the "poor Sue!" one, where she's out gleefully shopping her period away. The product is now called Midex or Midexatron or something, but it's probably the same stuff.

That bulge??

 

Oh, THAT bulge.

 

 

 

And here it is, that mysterious secret of marital happiness. It appears to come in a spray can and only costs 98 cents. A lot cheaper than a divorce.

Grog Grows Own Tail

Can't say just what started this, but maybe it was my daughter-in-law saying, "By the way, I sent away for the Sea Monkeys."

"The. . . the. . . (gulp)". . . (I was already being dragged into the past, and all those summers at the cottage with the Jimmy Olsen Annual).

"Oh yeah, but there's only one problem with them. They only come with a year's supply of food. So what are you supposed to feed them after that? Rubber boots?"

So you could still get them. It was hard to believe, in this age of cynicism and truth in advertising, but there it was. And kids still wanted them. My own grandkids wanted them. It was all a little hard to absorb.

The sea monkeys, along with so many things we yearned for in those old comic book ads, were the stuff of legend. We never actually sent away for them or for anything else, though I considered the 100 Dolls for $1 (not having any idea what they meant by "Lilliputian cuteness": would 9-year-old girls be likely to read Jonathan Swift?). It all had to do with American-ness, the American dollar looking nothing like the Canadian dollar. We just knew it was Different. You had to send actual dollars, because no one had heard of a money order in those days, plus all these things only cost about a buck.

Anyway, back to the sea monkeys: it was a very long time before I actually saw any, and I don't recall whose house I was in. There was a small plastic tank full of cloudy, smelly, slimy water, with little multi-legged things squirming around in it. Doing tricks, I suppose. No sign of a castle or royal sceptres.

The rest of the story wasn't filled in until about 10 years ago, when my husband and I made a trip to Utah and saw millions of brine shrimp, the only creatures who can withstand the thick saline waters of the Great Salt Lake.

Oh, OK then (choke), but there was still the Onion Gum ("Tastes like. . . like. . . ONIONS! It's too funny!" This was one of our favorites. I devoted a whole post to this tiny ad, riffing on it with all sorts of different photographic/photoshop effects.) And there were the hundreds of strong man ads with pictures of nearly-nude, wildly overdeveloped men flexing every muscle at once. These seemed to interest my brother Arthur, though I have come to wonder about it since.

Comic book ads were all tied in with summers at Bondi, a resort in Muskoka that qualifies as a little bit of heaven on earth. (The fact that Bondi is still there, preserved by my friend Nancy and her brother Brian, is even more of a marvel, and somehow gives me hope). For two weeks we were absolutely free. And of course we didn't fully appreciate it: we rampaged through that time like wild horses, and before we knew it we came to that miserable moment when we began to count the days we had left.

I wonder to this day how many live chihuahuas were delivered to kids willing to sell photo-finishing door to door, or unload tubes of salve. Or that poor monkey: how would it survive, and wouldn't it be so full of fear that it would bite everyone? Attitudes towards animals were different then (and the word chihuahua wasn't even used: but for God's sake, if we were supposed to understand lilliputian, what was so hard about chihuahua??). They were freight to be shipped. I wonder how many kids just didn't tell their parents.

I used to wonder about Grog, until I saw a Hawaiian ti plant at some sort of horticultural display. You just stuck it in the ground, and, voila! a shade tree in minutes. Whether Grog kept producing another tail, and another and another and another, was anyone's guess. But what can you expect for a buck?

Seeing these again gives me that queer feeling of deeply-buried deja vu. Many of the ads have been so enhanced that they look a thousand times more vibrant than the original grainy, 2" square things, usually plastered together on a great exuberant wall of ads. (These make great wallpaper, by the way.) And I even solved a few mysteries. For example, I found out exactly what you got if you sent away for the 100 dolls.

These looked like very chintzy Monopoly tokens, all of them made of pink plastic. There were maybe 30 different designs, but the thing is, they were 2" high and about a billionth of an inch thick, standing up on bases like those farm animals I used to have. I saw a collection of them on eBay, where they are now worth a lot of money as collectibles (though only if the 100-piece set is intact: people do count them).

I don't know, I get the strangest feeling seeing these. Paradise Lost, then found again. Not having, of course, and not just looking, but coveting. We wanted these things, we ached for them as only a child can ache, a child with no money and no power and no parental approval. I know a buck meant a lot more then, but why go to so much effort for such a lousy return? And wouldn't most people want their money back?

I don't look at comics now, they're all different, though I guess you can snoop around and find vintage ones if you're willing to pay top dollar (and I'm not). We don't put 15 cents into an envelope to get Onion Gum, not when there's PayPal and the like. I don't save Kellogg's box tops and send away for little plastic submarines that you fill with baking soda. It's a whole different game.