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One of the things I love about 60’s comic books are the glorious ads that promised adventure and hijinks if you mailed away for something like x-ray glasses and would later fill you with disappointment when you realized that it merely blurred your vision, and cost you a whole dollar to learn that lesson. The 60’s were an era when crap widget makers would try to sell anything to kids through cheap, but effective marketing.

Among the many wacky things you could mail away for in the groovy 60’s was a miniature pet monkey. Small enough to fit inside of a teacup, and presently an endangered species, the squirrel-monkeys offered in this ad could be yours for under $20 back in a day when exotic animal trafficking laws were obviously less stringent. According to the ad, you could feed them people food, and that they love lollipops. Of all the things to sell a kid who read comics in the 60’s, a live monkey ranks as one of the most questionable offers. I have to wonder about the kids who actually got one of these monkeys and whether they got bitten and clawed several times after dressing it up, getting it addicted to processed sugary treats, and the ensuing poo-flinging monkey fit that accompanied such animal abuse. And this is after the fact that the monkey they received was taken from it’s home in South America, caged and abused before it reached Suburbville USA to get into the grubby hands of a kid. So you’d get a mini-monkey with a chip on it’s shoulder from the start.

Now, how could I talk about 60’s comic ads without mentioning the most popular and well known offer to come from this era? I refer, of course, to Sea Monkeys. In the 60’s, Sea Monkeys were marketed as Instant Life and promised something way cooler than an ant farm; playing God with an undersea kingdom of strange creatures that could be contained within a small aquarium. Sea Monkeys were in fact, tiny brown squiggly things that died just as fast as they hatched. Kids in those days would beg their parents for something they thought would bring them endless amusement, and instead only got brine shrimp. The sea monkey fad started in 1960, became more popular in the 70’s, and would last into the 1980’s, hoodwinking kids for a couple of decades.

The silver age of comics was a golden age for comic ads that promised cheap thrills, but delivered less than you expected.

-Jim

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