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The Saturday Comics: Willie Lumpkin

9 Jul

July 9, 2011

Anyone who has read Marvel comics for any amount of time has likely run across Willie Lumpkin, senior citizen postal carrier. He has no super-powers (unless you count his ear-wiggling) yet is always in the thick of the action.

I stopped reading Marvel Comics a few years back when Joe Quesada decided to screw the fans by having Peter Parker make a deal with the devil and dissolve decades of continuity. And before you Marvel Zombies start writing me nasty comments, yes, DC is about to do the same thing and I’m dropping them too. Come September I will be following exactly one title, The Boys.

So unless Willie Lumpkin has been retconned out of existence, killed in another silly crossover aimed at the tin foil hat conspiracy brigade, or outfitted with an odd number of cybernetic arms, here are some highlights of Willie Lumpkin’s comic book career. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. You see, Willie Lumpkin has had a long career starring in a newspaper comic strip, looking quite a bit different.

Ah, Willie was so young back then. Not a Doctor Octopus or High Evolutionary in sight. And this was back in the days before “going postal” meant anything other than mailing a letter so all Willie had to put up with were frantic housewives.

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night stayed that courier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds

This version of Willie Lumpkin pre-dated his first comic book appearance by three years but only ran a single year, 1960. It was scripted by Stan Lee himself and illustrated by Dan DeCarlo, who is best known for his work on Archie Comics. 

Personally, I prefer this version better. In the comic books he’s comic relief, here he’s the comedian. Maybe I’m just a sucker for nostalgia. DeCarlo’s art gets me every time.

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The Saturday Comics: Cigarette Ads

2 Jul

July 2, 2011

Got your attention?

For those who don’t know, when The Flintstones was first broadcast in 1960 it was a prime-time show aimed at adults, like The Simpsons is today. As was typical of the time, the show had one main sponsor and the characters would plug the sponsor’s product, in this case Winston cigarettes.

While you could argue that it was an adult show so the ads were not aimed at children, the fact remains that children were a huge target of cigarette ads and using cartoon characters to push cigarettes was a broadside fired squarely at kids.

Cartoons were not the only children’s medium used to sell tobacco to kids. Comics were big areas of interest to Big Tobacco.


Baseball, a sports hero, and a comic strip. That pitch is aimed straight at the meaty part of the plate. I find that reprehensible, though I grudgingly admit the genius of that ad. Read it again but pay attention to what it doesn’t say, only what it implies. Nowhere does it say that smoking Camels made Joe DiMaggio a super athlete, but look at the actual photograph, with Joe talking about how he has smoked them for eight years, with his MVP award mentioned very conspicuously right below the smoking cigarette. What conclusion is a young kid reading a comic book supposed to reach? And notice the big “5 extra smokes in every pack.” You must get five more cigarettes in each pack, right? No, not really, read the fine print. And what kid does that?

What about the claim of 28% less nicotine? According to that ad, it is the smoke that contains less nicotine! That’s the part you exhale, not inhale. “Well, I’m no scientist, but I know” that claim says nothing about the nicotine in the cigarette itself and nothing about what you are inhaling.
 

Camels strike again. A comic, a test pilot, a fighter plane, and a woman. Camel pulled out all the stops for this one, and tops it all off with the implied approval of the armed forces.

Did you catch the blatant sexism too? “WHAT? A woman flying a Hellcat fighter?” I know these have to be judged by the standards of the era, but there is a stunning lack of subtlety in these ads.

Lack of subtlety? Look at this: 

If you can’t read the teeny tiny disclaimer at the bottom, it says “We do not say that smoking Luckies reduces flesh. we do say when tempted to overindulge, ‘Reach for a Lucky instead.'” No, they don’t say it, but “face the facts!” In all but words, that is what the ad is saying.

I’ll end this as I began, with a pair of popular celebrities shilling smokes. These two were the focus of a Saturday Comics several weeks ago.

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