Imagine making it to Third Base with the hottest girl in school using an ordinary TV set and a set of instructions that only cost THREE BUCKS!!!
…of course, somehow you would have to get the hottest girl in school to your basement turned rumpus room in order to pull the hypnotism via television caper on her. Maybe the instruction’s would have a helpful list of pretenses to get the girl over to your place.
Of course if a repair man actually discovered a secret method of bending minds to his will and made the mistake of bragging about it in a bar, dark-suited men would have pulled up to his shop in unmarked cars and whisked him away to an undisclosed location never to be seen again.
Now who’s going to fix the old console?
Sorry, old girl, but I’ve got no choice. It’s the curb for you.
Another thing I miss about comics is Iron Man’s nose…
…and M.O.D.O.K.’s prosthetic body.
I’m not sure why they felt it was necessary to mold a nose into Iron Man’s face mask,but they did. This was well before the carefully thought out mechanics of the armor that appeared in the recent comics and the blockbuster movies. Back then, comics couldn’t shake free of the Superman mold where the hero maintained a secret identity and wore his costume under his civilian clothes. All of the costumed crime-fighters wore their super-duds beneath their street clothes no matter how hot it was outside so they could be ready in a moment’s notice. You were supposed to suspend the disbelief and go along with the idea that within the skin tight costume was a miraculous array of micro-electronics that made Stark invincible. I always loved Iron Man comics, but I had a hard time swallowing the fantasy technology as a kid. The new armor is vastly superior to this silly old notion.
The villain in this book was MODOK which stood for Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing, and he was literally the head of Advanced Idea Mechanics or A.I.M. which was a company similar to Stark Industries only bent on EVIL! Ordinarily MODOK is a cranky looking head with weird little baby arms and legs. Jack Kirby must have thought him up during a fevered dream. In this issue, MODOK fits himself with a robotic body so he could go toe-to-toe/blow-for-blow with the Golden Avenger. On this Gil Kane cover, it looks as if the villain has gotten the best of our hero.
Leafing through this issue made me wonder about Advanced Idea Mechanics. Did they have a human resource department? What was the interview process for prospective employees like? Did they have a decent benefits package? Christmas bonuses? 401K?
This guy won’t be collecting a pension. At this precise moment he realizes why they didn’t request a salary history on the job application.
The hypnotism ad ran in various comics for years and years, but this particular instance appeared in The Invincible Iron Man No. 74 which was published by Marvel Comics in 1975.
