Some of you may have noticed some ad banners sneaking in on the Comics Journal web site. Believe it or not, this is in response to demand. And, as I had no urge to subject Kevin Scalzo, the Journal's ad manager, to the rigmarole of learning HTML coding, I've begun the excursion into this little corner of Corporate America. (In retrospect, it might have been easier to teach Kevin HTML.)

Like most of you, I imagine, I spent most of my childhood sitting back, like a sponge, taking in the jingles and catchphrases of wordsmiths and hucksters. As the saying goes, "I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toys 'R' Us kid." I was the target audience for just about everything on the market. But, at some point in high school, I began to think about advertising from a receptive end. It may have been when McDonald's adopted the self-spun "Mickey-D's" nickname (so much more attractive than "McRaunchy's," the name everyone I knew used, despite our communal addiction to McDonald's fries and St. Patrick's Day shakes). What blew me away, though, was that, one-by-one, my friends started referring to the home of the filler as, yes, "Mickey-D's." As you can tell, I never quite got over that. Persuasive advertising, apparently. I quickly learned about subliminal advertising (flashing an image of a bag of popcorn every 20th frame in a film adds surprisingly to the sales of concession snacks, despite that the eye never even sees the frame -- this practice is now highly illegal), sexual undertones (basically anything phallic), and all sorts of other tricks of the trade. I've since become very aware.

And when I started looking seriously at comics, O, these years past, I continued to keep some attention focused on ads, somewhere in the back of my head.

Comics, I would argue, originally served much the same purpose as ads. Back in the days of Wm. Randolph Hearst, the funnypages were adopted into the newspaper so that the publisher could afford to print the news. Okay, the publisher had to pay for the comic strips, but it was still the same basic principle. As R.C. Harvey pointed out in this month's "Comicopia," however, and as Lynn Johnston discussed in this month's feature interview, the times, they are a'changin'. With a couple of rare exceptions, publishers have become blissfully unaware of their comics pages. Now, beneath radar, comic strips have become, as Jim Steranko once put it, "The dandruff on the shoulder of American literature" -- something you may not be able to get rid of, but will endeavor to hide nonetheless (in dandruff's case, by not wearing dark blazers; in the funnies' case, by shrinking them to near-imperceptible size).

When comics moved to the periodical "nerd pamphlet" format, ads followed suit. Never let it be said that advertisers are any less vigilant than vultures. Find your market; exploit your market. It's a pretty simple formula.

And, by the time I was born, comic ads were pretty formulaic -- predictable, at least. You could group them into 3 types: (1) The bit-of-everything-page-of-ads, where a wide-eyed kid could find everything from Sea Monkeys to X-Ray Specs to a bag of magic tricks for 99¢. My roommate just got some Sea Monkeys for her birthday, so at least they have some staying power (though when's the last time you saw anyone wearing X-Ray Specs?). (2) The in-house-corporate-owned-characters-hocking-company-goods-ads. Everything from Archie Fan-Club memberships to decoder rings fell into this bracket. And yes, in my early sponge days, I was unable to withstand the pull of these bright, colorful money-magnets. I talked my mother into getting me a Six-Million-Dollar-Man beachtowel, a Batman-and-Robin towel and a Superman towel. The 2/3 life-sized towel bearing the image of Lee Majors survives to this day (as does the Batman comic that I clipped the ad from with a pair of safety-scissors when I was 6). (3) The page-of-comic-art-designed-to-sell-you-something. These pieces of InconSequential Art bred two champions: the Hostess ads featuring your favorite Marvel and DC superheroes (I still wonder how these came about); and probably the most famous ad ever to be featured in a comic: "The Insult that Made a Man out of Mac."

Conceived by Charles Roman, co-founder of Charles Atlas' fitness enterprise, the single-page piece of InconSequential Art featured a young man, Mac, having sand kicked in his face by the beach bully. In front of his girl, yet. Oh, the humanity! Humiliated by the incident, Mac orders the Charles Atlas fitness program, bulks up into some sort of Bronze God, and returns to the beach. He pops the bully a good one (who had, by then, usurped poor Mac's girl), thereby winning back the respect of his groovy chick. It's an American Story.

Sadly, Roman died this past July 16 at the age of 92. His legacy, however, remains.

Like many of you, I imagine, I never had to suffer the indignance of having sand kicked in my face by the beach bully. In fact, I don't believe my beach even had a bully. Just the same, I was always intrigued by the ad. OK, I never actually purchased the product (I think it was a book, but, hell, it could have been a set of barbells for all I know about exercise), but I was intrigued. Come to think of it, I don't know a single person who did purchase the product on sale, but The Hero of the Beach remains one of the most memorable comic ads of all time -- clearly evidenced by the number of parodies of the ad we've seen. It's shown up in parodic versions in Nickelodeon Magazine, Flex Mentallo and Marvel's What The -- ?! It's funny, really, I don't remember half the stories I read in comics when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, but I remember the ads. As much (or, even, more) a sign of the times than the comics themselves.

And comic creators themselves were certainly aware of the ads. A comic, despite what the McCloudians would have you believe, is more than simply a series of panels. The story in a comic book is contained in a structure -- the comic book, itself. And the story must, inevitably, conform to that structure. The narrative in a comic is either contained by the number of pages in a single issue, or else, is structured over a series of these issues, each issue as a chapter in this metastory. Creators adapted to this necessary evil by building up to cliffhangers at the end of each issue -- something to make you purchase the next installment of the story. It's nothing new -- radio serials did the same thing in the '30s. Something else that the more esteemed comics creators did was build cliffhangers around ads in the comics. Jack Kirby was once such master of the form. Build to a climax -- a cliffhanger -- directly before a two-page spread of ads, with resolution following the commercial. Ingenious. It's a rare artist who can take a seemingly necessary evil and use it to advance the story. Of course, once these comics are reprinted, with ads removed (as is often the case with Kirby's work), the effect is dulled somewhat.

Continuing this line of thought, I've noticed the recent collection of the X-Men / W.I.L.D.Cats crossover printed pin-up pages where ads would have appeared in the original story. I suspect this is more likely for reasons of page-layout (you can't have a double-page spread if one of the preceding pages in the printing signature is missing) than story flow, but it goes to show how inter-related comics and their ads have become.

The vast majority of self-published and small-press comics out there are ad-free. Any number of reasons factor into a creator's or publisher's decision in whether or not to run ads. And even the odd mainstream comic comes out ad-free. But I've only very rarely noticed any difference in flow between comics which do and do not incorporate ads into their books (aside from those times when I've caught myself reading one of those Batman Hostess ads as if it were part of the story it was interrupting). It's like the difference between a movie and a television show. Creators design their work around ads, if ads there be, or as a single, non-stop work, if it's ad-free. Think about how well a half-hour sitcom flows, versus how well a movie flows on TBS, all broken up by commercials. One's designed to be infiltrated with ads; the other isn't.

Of course, ads are not without their inherent problems when applied to comics works. While Mad Magazine has foregone ads altogether (the only real ad -- as opposed to parody ad -- that you'll find in any issue of Mad is the in-house subscription ad, appearing on the inside-front cover of every single issue since God knows when), Heavy Metal has never shied away from running ads. If you don't already see it coming, the issue that arises from this difference comes to the fore in that every issue of each periodical has recently been reprinted in whole on CD-Rom (over 20 years' worth of Heavy Metal; over 40 years' of Mad). While permissions of the comics artists, themselves, have not seemingly been obtained in either case, neither have permissions of the advertisers to reproduce their creations in the history-spanning CD-Rom collection been obtained, it seems, in the case of Heavy Metal. And, though I don't intend to spend the room in this editorial laying out the legalese specifics of this case, suffice it to say it's now one hell of a complicated matter.

But ads aren't going to go away. Ads mean money. And, God knows, we're not the biggest profit-making industry out there. Comics and ads have been intrinsically tied to one another since near comics' beginnings.

Indeed, no media is ad-free these days. Paperback novels began devoting pages to ads decades ago, and ads no longer simply interrupt television shows -- they infiltrate them. Did you think all of those iMacs popping up in your favorite sitcoms were coincidence? Product-placement seems to be the ad wave of the future. And yes, placed products have even begun creeping their way into comics. Am I the only one who noticed the very visual predominance of the iMac in The Adventures of Evil and Malice? I didn't think so.

There's a difference, though, between a trend and a tradition. Product-placement is a trend in advertising. It could pass away tomorrow. But advertising in media is a tradition. It's not going anywhere. But it changes, it adapts. As one form becomes useless, a new one rises from the ashes. As a new media makes itself known, the ad-men come running.

Ads have been a part of the Journal for some time. Hell, it's ads that started the Journal, back when we were The Nostalgia Journal. Then, no more than a CBG-styled adzine, the Journal relied on the money that advertising provided simply to stay afloat. It's less-so dependent now, with Journal ads making up very little of our operating budget (hence the cheap prices), but the ads aren't going anywhere. And with the increasingly visual voice on the Internet, you can expect to see more ads popping up -- both on the Journal site, and elsewhere, everywhere, on the Internet. Ads are, quite literally, everywhere. The trick is making sure your product -- your writing, your art, your work -- is more memorable than the InconSequential Art that survives on its fringes.

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