On The House
Whenever I think, “I don’t really have any more Reference posts to write,” I inevitably think of something that I want to write about that doesn’t really fit in any other category and doesn’t warrant the creation of a new one.
Such is the case with this post, in which I was reminded of something and decided I wanted to write about it.
That something being comic book house ads.
Comics used to have a lot of house ads – to the extent that they have ads now they’re almost exclusively house ads – which as the name and the examples above suggest, are ads for other comics the company publishes.
In the early ’80s, just as I was getting into regularly picking up new comics, DC launched the series of house ads like the one above. Each month’s comics would feature a page showing off a selection of comics that would be hitting the stands.
I viewed the ads as a challenge, or even a homework assignment, pledging to do my level best to pick up all of the comics advertised, even if it wasn’t a comic in which I would typically be interested. For example, this ad inspired me to pick up House of Mystery, a comic that I previously had never given much thought.
Now, whether or not I could complete my “homework assignment” wasn’t entirely up to me, given that I was at the mercy of chance when it came to the availability of a given comic and at the mercy of my mother’s generosity when it came to buying the comics that were available.
In this instance, for example, I got a B-, as I did not pick up that Legion of Super-Heroes digest. I assume it’s simply because I didn’t see it, because if I had, my mother would have likely allowed me to pick it up, as she was generally partial to buying me digests given the value proposition. They were, after all, “the biggest little buy in comics.”
That said, I did tun in the full assignment eventually, as a year or two later I got that digest – sans cover – in a mystery pack.
Also, there were usually other house ads besides this one in a given issue, so I got extra credit by picking up two other comics that were prominently advertised that month: Saga of the Swamp Thing #1 and The Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Man #1.
Speaking of house ads…
I’m not sure why these ads in particular had such an impact on me. I suppose it’s because getting new comics was, well, new to me, so I was just generally excited at the prospect of getting even more new comics.
And while I happily read any comic from any publisher that landed in front of me, I had already established a preference for DC over Marvel or Harvey or Charlton or Archie.
Decades before it would become a slogan for the current era of their comics, I was All In on DC.
Not that I wasn’t impacted by house ads from other companies. There is, for example, a house ad from Marvel that inspired a decades long obsession.
But the DC house ads – and this style in particular – really stood out to me and drove my purchasing decisions, and think that another part of it was that, with new comics, I was finally seeing house ads for comics that were available contemporaneously with the comics they were advertised in as I was reading them.
Prior to this period, most of the comics I had were months or even years old by the time I got them out of mystery packs or from a used bookstore, so, barring a fortuitous mystery pack purchase, I couldn’t actually buy any of the comics I saw in those house ads.
So now it was at least possible for me to pick up the comics I saw advertised, and DC was telling me that I should, and who was I to say no?
Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.
