Memories are made of... Squirrels?

From when I was about 10 until the place changed hands in my late teens, one of our local newsagents had a wall-rack topped with a stove-enamelled, professionally manufactured (so evidently required in some quantity) sign that read “American Comics”. The rack contained an eclectic selection confused mish-mash of everything from Archie and Casper the Friendly Ghost through Superman, Batman, Spiderman and the rest, to lesser-known stuff like Turok Son of Stone, Magnus - Robot Fighter and various “Classics Illustrated” titles. All of this made an interesting, if rather gaudy, change of pace from my usual diet of Ranger, Look & Learn, the almost interchangeable war-and-sport Hornet/Hotspur/Hurricane/Rover/Valiant/Victor bunch and (my Dad’s favourite) Wizard; this last wasn’t so much a comic as a story magazine, since it was about 90% text with maybe one graphic strip. (Small wonder Dad approved of it: this was a comic for reading, not just for skimming the pictures.)

Of course, there were also the adverts... I can’t remember much about what the British comics offered; football and cricket stuff comes to mind, but since organised sport was (and still is) about as appealing as a case of hives, the attraction was minimal. The American ads were much more interesting. I remember the usual back cover splash inviting readers to sell Grit – a real newspaper, despite the odd name – and earn points for prizes: bicycles, air-rifles and BB-guns (“You’ll shoot your eye out...”) motorized model aircraft, telescopes, cameras and so on. It was absolutely the print equivalent of the toyshop window scene in A Christmas Story, which included one of the very model planes from the “Grit” ads – look out for the green Fokker DVII biplane hanging at the top of the window display. However, to this day I haven’t met anyone from the States who actually (or let’s say, who’ll admit to having) sold the paper. Odd, that.

And then there were the amazing toys which looked so much better than anything in the local shops; not true, by the way; a great deal of good stuff, such as my Johnny-7 One-Man-Army, the toy gun to have, arrived at Christmas and birthday from no further afield than Lisburn or maybe Belfast.

I even tracked down one of my I-wants on this page (Lord, you can find anything on the Net, and there are a bunch of other ads on that site!); a Polaris submarine with a working periscope, torpedoes and missiles. But looked at with the cynical eye of almost forty years on, I see one thing that all these ads had in common: almost every one of them was illustrated by a drawing rather than a photograph. It’s more than likely that the real thing was a lot less impressive in the flesh (or cardboard, plywood, plastic or whatever) than the description suggested. How much will $6.98 (even at 1960s purchasing power) actually buy you? Maybe more than I suspect; but I can’t help thinking there were a lot of disappointed kids when the package was finally delivered.

Pacifists – not that I was one – didn’t get much of a look-in; there were cardboard simulated-wood military footlockers filled with World War II soldiers, tanks and “airplanes” (aeroplanes, surely?); the Civil War armies with cavalry and cannon, “molded” (that’s moulded, isn’t it?) in Blue and Gray (you mean Grey, don’t you?) and so on.

All right, enough joking about the difference in US/UK spelling; at the time it fascinated me – why leave the “u” out of “colour”? That would mean it was pronounced “collor”. Why sometimes write “through” and at other times “thru”? And so on. However, it was something Dad muttered about, in case it started turning up in my schoolwork. Well, of course not; even at that age I was smart enough to know that US spelling didn’t belong in Northern Irish schools, and he really got off my case after I wrote an essay for my English class (which got me one of the few A+ marks of my entire career) on the differences between US and British English. The only thing I recall about it is a lengthy paragraph discussing the whys and wherefores of aluminum versus aluminium, and why chromium, magnesium, titanium, uranium (better stop before I sound like Tom Lehrer) all take the I on both sides of the Atlantic. I like to think I was at least as conclusive on the subject as Wikipedia.

Pinhead (ex Hellraiser) could open any one of these comics and quite rightly speak his trademark "We have such sights to show you..." line. Not quite chains and hooks, but strangeness and (for the most part, anyway) a certain quirky charm nonetheless. You could meet sea-monkeys, which turn out to be a sort of shrimp; Charles Atlas and Dynamic Tension; X-Ray specs, which probably worked as well (i.e. not at all) as the X-Ray Alice Band my kid sister got with a copy of her Lady Penelope comic; Count Dante, the Deadliest Man Alive; and you might, just might, because you may be wondering about the title of this blog entry, see...

Don't make my mistake. Put down whatever you’re drinking. Swallow the mouthful.

All right. Now click on this.

Fun! Yes, sir! (Am I the only one unsettled by the hearty enthusiasm of those three words?) It might be fun, for a given value of the word, but certainly not for the squirrel. Lamps; ashtrays, bookends - and lamps need lampshades...

I think I should shunt that particular train of thought into a siding and leave it there. Did the copywriter for this have no idea what sort of image he was conjuring up? The book ("Contains many fine pictures" - oh, I bet it does) might be something Ed Gein would have found useful.

As for the hamsters: of all the enticements that could have gone into an ad for such cute little creatures, someone decided on "Laboratories use thousands".

Ew. Just ew.