I miss the lurid ads with the offers that were too good to be true. If Mom came through with that check or money order, would you have really received a 7 foot tall monster-sized monster that would have impressed the crap out of all the kids and made you the undisputed king of grade school?
N0. Mom had more sense than you did. That’s why she was Mom.
This was from Charlton Comics All New Fightin’ Marines No. 116 from 1973-74.
I love Charlton Comics. I wish they were still around. They were wonderfully low rent compared to the Big Two. They did all sorts of comics – war, Western, funny animal, super-hero, licensed properties – and they did them on the cheap. I remember them in the spinning racks along with Marvel and DC at the drug store. All comics were crap culture at the time, but Charlton was closer to the base of that newsprint totem pole than the other guys. What was refreshing was that Charlton had no self aggrandizing editors-in-chief; no iconic characters that heirs were going to spend a mountain of dough suing people over, and, outside of Steve Ditko, was staffed with creators I never heard of.
Check out this weirdly stylized nurse below. It looks like she was cribbed from a pantyhose or feminine hygiene ad from that time. She smiles serenely as this guy recollects the horrors of his battlefield experiences.
“That’s fascinating, Lieutenant. Now make me a B.M., and you can get out of here.”
Charlton was headquartered in Derby, Connecticut and they did their own printing. According to stories I’ve read, the comics were printed on a second-hand press that was previously used to print cereal boxes. From the look of some of the comics, they must have printed a lot of cereal boxes before they started printing comics and magazines.
I loved how they would get a little sloppy with the printing registration. This guy’s blue eyes have turned into eye shadow or process blue bruises. These comics weren’t the cream of the crop, but they would have to do, and for 20¢, they did!
