Tell Them The Sunday Paper Sent You

Monday Advertising Day. 

Some years ago I clipped a whol lot of Sunday newspaper ads from the Francisco Chronicle, a paper that does not appear on every micro-fiche paper site. Some of these I have shared before, others are new. Most need a bit of explanation. 

This ad for Baker's Cacoa Mix is the work of the Johnstone and Cushing company. Some Baker's ads were done by Dik Brown. This one seems more like a mix of Creig Flessel and Jack Betts' talents.

Weston's Honey Graham Crackers is harder to pinpoint. The way the kid sits in the last image is reminiscant of Dik Brown, who would have had to change his style consiberable to do this.

I have shared several ads for Jergens lotion in the past and have always felt they could be the work of Ken Bald.

If Willy the Penguin wasn't conceived to sell kids on cigarettes, at least they were done to normalize them for when they grew up. The comic book version was done by Chad Grothkopf, although I am not sure if he did the (many) newspaper ads.

Stan Randell imitation All Around Home for Nescafé.

Pacquins ads were around for a long time and although I think it had different inkers at different times the main aetist underneath all of them is Gunnar Peterson, the guy who created and solidified the photorealistic style of American newspaper advertising comics, using a variety of influences.

One of the influences on Peterson was Lou Fine, who was famous for his long run on the Philip Morris cigarettes ads. I have colected most of them in one big earlier post, many of which with my own scans in color.

These Purex ads were signed by Pineo. I may have shown them before on a seperate post on his work.

RoyalDesserts was done by a very competent artist, although I can't see which one.  

From an ad by Johnstone & Cushing about their company we know Wexler had the Sal Hepatica account.

Swan Soap seems to have been done by Gill Fox in the same style he used for his comic strip Jeanie.

Tootsie was created by C. C. Beck. He often drew them with Pete Costanza, who got to sign them. This one seems to be by Bill Schreiber, who took over from them in 1950.

The Triton ads were one of a few series that were don in a Ripley Believe It Or Not Style. I have shared some before, but there seem to have been more. Some of these look as if they were done by later The Heart of Juliet Jones artist Stan Drake.

 

What The Beck?

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Captain Tootsie appeared in just about every comic from every publisher in the forties and early fifties. The series ans the character were initiated by Captain Marvel artists C. C. Beck and Pete Costanza. After their first run of four to five years, the series was taken over by Bill Schreider. The last artist to do them was Pete Costanza on his own. Most of these comic book ads were adapted from the two weekly Sunday newspaper ad series. And of course there also was a comic book version.

So manyof these ads were made and so many of them were used in comic books, that no one has ever managed to create a list of all ads used in the comic books. They are titled, so a good list could be made. But even with most comic books from that period available on the internet now, who has the time to go through all of them? And even then, with many key DC books still not in public domain, who know what strips are in the Superman and Batman books? And as for the supposedly original series in the newspapers even if you would find a run in one of the papers avaiable on microfiche somewhere, there would be over five hundred to collect and even then you wold not know if the order in which they were used was the same in every paper (which it seems not to be the case).

So it is a hit or miss operation. I collect these ads where I can and put them on my blog in the hope that maybe someday someone can use them to create a more coherent timeline. I would love to know how and if these ads were rebuild for the comic books. Frankly, I have not yet seen even one in both forms, although similar series that were used in papers and comics (like the Sam Spade series) suggest that must be the case.

And added to that, there are the back and white strips, which may or may not have been made for daily newspapers. The ones I have here are all streamers that were run underneath normal comic strips in a Sunday paper, but as you can see they could also be cut up for use elsewhere. Of course, there are doubles as well, suggesting there may only have been a couple which were used and reused whenever possible.