Thomas Welch’s testimonial is from an ad offering untold riches or fabulous prizes to kids hawking packets of seeds for a seed company. These types of ads were fairly common when comics were sold in spinning racks at drug stores for pocket change. When I was younger, I used to pore over the prizes and wonder how much stuff had to be sold to score a sweet transistor radio or a cassette tape recorder. That’s as far as my day dreaming would go. Being that I grew up in a suburban area just outside of Philadelphia, I couldn’t imagine why anybody would buy seeds. People may have had a window box or a small garden. There would never be enough demand to score a boss Engine Powered Mustang airplane. Besides, wouldn’t people just buy seeds at a store? Maybe kids in rural areas made out better with this type of racket. The seed company must have made out all right. This was a back cover, full-page ad which was an expensive ad for comics in the 1970s. It must have worked because during the Silver, Bronze and probably the Golden Age of Comics there was never a shortage of these ads.
This was the back cover of Conan the Barbarian No. 72 which came out late in 1976. The cover is by the great Gil Kane and lovingly inked by Ernie Chan.
The kid in that ad looks like Ernie from My Three Sons.
I thought so too – if left side of Ernie’s jaw was hacked off with a machete!
Maybe he cut himself shaving.
That six bucks will buy a lot of Band-Aids.