thread upstairs in IMWAN's Playroom, but I wanted to archive a better, larger version of Uncle Rog's ad on his own board. (This scan is from Dave P.'s collection ~ click to enlarge.)
More Secrets Behind the Comics: The Marvel Hostess ads were written by Hostess's ad agency...the Ted Bates Agency*, I think...who really phoned the jobs in. They didn't even try to get the heroes' voices, and we usually had to do some re-writing on staff to fix the dialog as best we could. (I personally re-wrote most of the Hulk ad that JB drew.)
Frank [Miller]'s Torch ad originally had him fighting a villain the agency named Iceman. Yeah, they had no idea that Marvel already had an Iceman character. Frank caught that and designed the villain we wound up calling "Icemaster" (which sounds as though it should be a Ronco product).
In an earlier Spider-Man Hostess ad, the Agency writer called for Spider-Man to be battling a super-powered villain called "The Black Widow." Once again, they were completely ignorant of the existence of Marvel's Black Widow. But Ross Andru, who penciled the ad, wasn't...so he dutifully drew Marvel's Black Widow. Someone on staff altered her outfit and Archie Goodwin renamed her "Madame Web." A different Madame Web was later introduced into the Spider-Man comic, to fully establish Marvel's rights to the name.
Surprisingly, no one was ever interested in establishing similar rights to Icemaster. Maybe they just forgot about him.
In the early days of the ad campaign, some readers expressed confusion/anger/dismay when...oh, let's say...a Hulk hostess ad suddenly appeared toward the end of a Hulk story...drawn by the same artist. Arrangements were eventually made so that ads featuring Marvel heroes would be switched, so that ads featuring, say, Spider-Man did not appear in Spider-Man comics.
Anyway, artists generally enjoyed drawing the ad-strips, since they were paid a special rate...at least one-and-a-half times their regular page rate. That was still probably peanuts compared to what the Agency's staff artist would have been paid. And, of course, those of us on staff who had to fix the agency's bad writing got zip.
-- Uncle Rog
*When I worked in radio -- in my pre-Marvel days -- I often had to re-write bad radio copy supplied by...the Ted Bates Agency. (And somehow, those guys were always paid more than I was.)
