Hostess Heroes Versus Fa-a-a-a-a-a-at Bitches

Wonder Woman and Cup Cakes "The Maltese Cup Cakes"
This is the first time, as far as I'm aware, that Hostess Cup Cakes had ever gotten a double billing with the lead superhero, unless "cup cakes" is some sort of JLA Satellite locker-room slang that Firestorm and Zan of the Wonder Twins used to fling back and forth just to pretend they weren't irredeemably fey. "You see ol' Wonder Woman and Cup Cakes in the briefing this morning?" Oh yeah, ol' Cup Cakes.

Anyway, I guess what was always missing from both the Hostess snack ads and Wonder Woman in general was a gender-bent reimagining of The Maltese Falcon, featuring a Petula Lorry, a Mr.Astor, and a Cindy Bluestreet a.k.a. The Fat Lady, a.k.a. Big Bad Muumuu Mama, a.k.a. Seat-Buster.

You're also looking at what is arguably the most text-heavy Hostess as in history, this thing reads like a Pynchon novel, which is appropriate because Harold Bloom calls it one of the fleeting examples of Twentieth Century American Sublime. And Cup Cakes.


Daredevil's Longest Fight!
Man, speaking of fa-a-a-a-a-a-at bitches, check out this fa-a-a-a-a-a-at bitch Daredevil's fighting here. That is one fa-a-a-a-a-a-at bitch. He's even got bitch tits, way to go Daredevil, your Hostess ads were generally uninspired, but at least you fought the fa-a-a-a-a-a-attest bitch of all. If I don't count The Penguin.

Evidently, this is one of the rare occasions when Daredevil confronts someone with a handicap as profound and life-affecting as his own. Daredevil was, of course, blinded as a teen by a street-hopping can of radioactive waste, which not only permanently removed his sight but also gifted upon him extra-sensory powers in the form of his radar sense and enhanced other-sensory perceptions.

Baby Face Johnny, relatedly, is a fucking moron.

What i like about this ad is that we join it with the bulk of the conflict already played out, and that it ends with Daredevil basically being really sarcastic. Daredevil's a great comic book if you like sarcastic superheroes, and also superheroes who constantly have nervous breakdowns and you think might just snap and kill a cop. Which you probably won't see in a Hostess ad, but who can say?

Spider-Man in The Trap
So, it turns out - and you won't know this til you get to the end of the strip - that the villainess' name in this particular outing is "Larcenous Lil." For some reason, it was necessary to maintain some level of tension and suspense about this character's nom de crime (I love that phrase, and I gotta remember to ask Bob Rozakis who came up with it so I can give them a mint edition copy of Ragman #3 - thirty cents). This is exactly like a M.Night Shmamapopadopoulos-or-whatever movie. "Her name's Larcenous Lil," you might tell your friends, and then they go, "Oh, hey, SPOILERS, okay? Thank you!"

Anyway, evidently the way that you defeat Spider-Man is that you throw a sad-looking net on his wall-crawling ass. Let's look back on literally more than two thousand individual issues of Amazing Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Marvel Team-Up, Web of Spider-Man and some coupla dozen others and point out that no one ever really thought of doing that before, except Kraven I guess. Anyway, I don't know, you think the Hostess ad writers maybe didn't really care about the threats they invented? I do.