Advertisements

I find that I have a love-hate relationship with advertisements in comics.  I realize that, from an economic standpoint, anyway, they are something of a necessary evil, but I'm looking at this from a strictly aesthetic standpoint.  A few years ago, Marvel had big, two-page ads for the Honda CR-V smack dab in the front of their books, which irked me to no end, and before that they had a string of books where the flow of pages was interrupted quite demonstratively by an ad spread.  But then I think about all of the back issues I buy, and how amusing the old 2"x3" ad clips for fake mustaches and 'miracle' weight gain are, and suddenly I embrace ads as a part of the fun in collecting - a cultural barometer even more accurate than seeing the Thing and the Human Torch in Beatle wigs on one of those old Strange Tales covers (at least I think it was ST) or JFK dressing up as Superman.  "If I can't trust the President of the United States with my secret identity, who can I trust?"

Now that we're almost two full issues into the production of Teddy and the Yeti, I'm starting to think about things like page layout and how I'm going to fill those non-story pages.  I'm sure I'll throw in some staples like a letters/editorial page, maybe some of those 'anatomy of a page' features, but I keep coming back to advertisements and how fun it'd be to see one of those in my book - almost like a validation that this is a "real" comic book.  I honestly don't know how I'd even approach someone about placing an ad in the book, and I especially don't know that anyone would be willing to fork over cash for an ad in an unknown quantity like T&Y.

Because I am a nostalgic collector at heart, I'll probably end up trying to give away some ad space to places like the Hero Initiative, a comic book charitable organization that has a real fancy logo.  That way, I get what I want - cool ads that make the book feel legitimate without disrupting the story flow.

Dibs on the back cover?  Line 'em up.