MAD AD MONDAY : YOUR HORRIBLE FACE

Advertising in general has never gone wrong by playing off the inadequacies and fears of its consumers, and ads in comic books were doubly unafraid to target the unreasonable dread of social exclusion as held by its pubescent audience. Puberty brings many unpleasant changes to the human body, and advertisers targeting these poor, dumb kids were not shy about hammering home the essential lesson: your face is a nightmare and you will have to live in a cave if you don’t use a plastic syringe to give your sebaceous glands a series of tiny monster hickeys.

"Frankly Jim, you and your sister are a pair of ghastly shits."

Young men and their assorted insecurities are generally the targets of comic book advertising - thus the proliferation of ads for guns, muscle-building schemes, martial arts-by-mail, "hypnosis" ads (which were always thinly veiled promos for seduction-technique books, in case the image of a man shooting electricity out his eyes at a swooning, buxom broad didn't clue you in) and so on. However, zits are an equal-opportunity terrorizer, and the core conceit of a young girls' fancy is fair game to the pimple hoover game ...

Soldiers, returned from the war, patrolling the streets for young women with unmarred faces...

Puberty is a tough row to hoe, and the inability to comprehend that it'll eventually be over is often the worst part. Owing either to the relative inexperience of the blossoming teen, amidst a sea of body hair and oily stink, or to the wild hormones confusing general clear-headedness, it's an easy bullseye to convince the young audience of these books that bad skin lasts an eternity unless action is taken immediately!

Of course, if all else fails, there's one sure way to hide those unsightly blemishes...