12 Ways of Thinking About this Ad from the Back of a 1980 Comic Book
When I read comics as a kid, the advertisements were a part of the experience. I didn’t skip or fast-forward past them. I studied them, memorized them — read them — with as much imaginative energy as I brought to the stories themselves. The ads — for bubblegum, Hostess Fruit Pies, breakfast cereal (so much junk food!)— were vital landmarks in my reading landscape.
I have passed a lot of my old comics on to my children. They read them, occasionally, with passing interest, when they can’t find anything better to do. In truth, I think they keep them piled up in their rooms for my benefit. I haven’t really given the comics away but rather found an excuse to keep them close and avoid discarding them forever. I often wander in and pick up an issue from the top of a stack, daydreaming myself back into the familiar grooves of a different time and space. Sometimes the children aren’t even home when I do this. When I reread along with my kids, we mostly ignore the ads, unless it is to marvel at how cheap things used to be — Wow, you could get a whole year’s worth of comics delivered right to your house for 8 bucks?
I was rereading an old issue of Bugs Bunny the other night with my daughter. It was an unspectacular, often boring story involving Bugs and Yosemite Sam getting stranded on an island run by children. A popsicle thief runs around in a gorilla costume. Yosemite Sam, whose dialogue is the highlight, says a lot of things like “Tarnation!” and “Dagnab it!”. My daughter yawned throughout. I’m pretty confident that when I was her age, I had memorized the entire issue, panel by panel. The fossilized remnants of all these earlier readings, long forgotten, were unearthed in my head. The issue ends with Bugs making a non-functioning airplane entirely out of popsicle sticks. There was a period in my life, however brief, when this plane was the most spectacular, magical thing I had ever encountered.
On the inside of the back cover was the ad pictured above. Seeing it as I closed up the issue moved me in some way. This ad for toy soldiers of the Revolution is pervasive in comics of a certain vintage. I had seen it hundreds of times before. I remember similar ads featuring clashing armies — one in the Roman period for sure, and one set in the twentieth century, featuring the better known green army men. Like the glimpse I got of Bugs and his popsicle stick airplane, there was a time in my life when I was awestruck by this particular image and all that it offered to my eager young mind. I tucked my daughter in, kissed her goodnight, and put the comic down, but the image continued to rattle around my head.
I was struck by the weirdness of a war scene being the final image in a story for young children, a story almost cloying in its childishness. I was struck by the fact that my younger self, every time he encountered it, interpreted this war imagery as commonplace and absolutely normal. Here are some other things I ended up thinking about:
1 — Infantrymen are divided into four types: Shooting, Marching, Crouching, and Charging.
2 — As a kid, I could never imagine defacing a comic by carving out a coupon so that I could mail it away. I probably would have sooner sacrificed the tip of a finger. For a while, seeing my children recklessly crimp and bend comics I had kept pristine for years made me wince. I don’t wince quite so much anymore. I figure I’d rather watch them fall to tatters than have them suffocate out of sight in the garage.
3 — The coupon is addressed to “Gentlemen.” 1980 isn’t so terribly long ago, but it is.
4 —
Aren’t they all?
5 — Mohawks. The set includes “24 Mohawk Indians.” I went back to my daughter’s room, got the comic, and stared at this picture for about five minutes, noting little details, trying to dream myself back into or toward my younger self. I wrote a few lines about the Mohawks not being pictured, about the grim symbolism of their absence. Then I saw them. They are off to the right side, charging at the head of the British forces. Charging into no man’s land. The ad only champions “2 Complete Armies.” I’m not sure what this makes the Mohawks.
6— “No Canadian or foreign orders.” This seems fitting, somehow, and makes me smile.
7 — Dragoon was a word that I knew, but had never really looked into. As a kid, the word reminded me of “dragon,” obviously. Turns out that’s where it comes from. The first definition in the OED dates to the 1600s, referring to “a kind of carbine or musket” that breathed fire on the battlefield (all those puffs of smoke in the drawing). The second definition is for “a species of cavalry soldier.” I think about a soldier and a soldier’s weapon carrying the same name. Humans name the weapon. The weapon names the soldier. I think about what it means to be a “species” of soldier. Shooting. Marching. Crouching. Charging.
8— Hessian troops? This word was new to me. I wonder if any kids who ordered this set in 1980 had to look this up. A bit of digging and I find out Hessians were German soldiers from the state of Hesse-Kassel hired by the British to fight in America. That same night I am reading an indispensable new essay by Phil Klay on “The Citizen-Soldier,” and he mentions Hessian mercenaries in his discussion of the Revolution. Reading is a series of serendipitous accidents.
9 — A friend alerted me to the Klay essay by passing along this image from it, a recruitment poster from the Revolution:
Toy soldiers. Neither the ad nor the poster use this phrase, but that’s what comes to mind.
10 — Red versus Blue. Primary colours are such enduring, stubborn things.
11 — “Hours of Fun for the Whole Family.” If you say so.
12 — As I get older, I realize comics are becoming an increasingly powerful, personal metaphor for understanding how my memory works — its dependability, its fragility, its pleasures, its poignancy, its strangeness, its slow fade from vibrancy to muddiness, mustiness.
Thinking all this while my daughter slept, peacefully, in the darkness of her room, down the hall, worlds away.
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