What I Miss About Comics…Celebrity Endorsements

Before anybody knew who they were.

Do you know this couple?

Pick you up at your place?

Well, she’s not really anybody, but she’s probably a nice person, a good wife and mother, and probably a fairly decent grandmother at this point. At the time she was just a prop to be propped up by then champion body-builder and eventual movie star, politician and father Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this ad, they are shilling a course of study that will give the student tree trunk-like extremities just like the Austrian fellow with the unpronounceable name in mere weeks! What are you waiting for? Buxom babes in bikinis will be lining up to perch themselves incongruously atop one of the rock hard shoulders of your new rippling physique!

Sgt. FuryThe ad above was in issue #93 of SGT. Fury and His Howling Commandos from 1971. Inside is a bunch of self-contained stories reprinted from comics originally published in 1965. As you can see, this is back in World War II before Fury lost the eye; before he became a James Bond knock-off in Agent of SHIELD, and back when he was still a Caucasian. This is probably confusing to the folks who only know about these characters through the Mighty Marvel Movies currently conquering the cinema, but for the kids who loitered around the spinning racks in drug stores and newsstands, this is how we knew Nick Fury who, along with his Howling Commandos (the whole howling thing makes it tough where stealth is involved), riddled an endless parade of Nazis with machine gun bullets.

 

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