Each Friday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from Golden State thrift stores, estate sales, and flea markets.
The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man
Date: 1983
Publisher: Marvel
Questions This Cover Raises:
Kool-Aid Man has long been the exemplar of the most special breed of advertising characters: the kind who invite consumers to feast on their own guts. (See also Charlie Tuna, Twinkie the Kid, Mayor McCheese, and Jesus.)
What sets Kool-Aid Man apart is his habit of inviting us to drink of his flesh only after he has racked up some serious property damage.
Maybe they can sell Kool-Aid at the bake sale they hold to fund a new ballpark.
Here we see Kool-Aid Man's headquarters, which seem to have been designed by the architectural firm of Short & Stout:
Yes, Kool-Aid Man has a chopper. Notice that he pilots it one-handed, as at all times he lugs about a pitcher full of himself.
Throughout this godawful comic, Kool-Aid Man battles the Thirsties, fiery yellow villains who for some reason enjoy nothing more than temporarily parching children -- a condition relievable only by beverage access. Here, Kool-Aid Man larks off into outer space to quench the thirst of kids trapped by Thirsties on an interstellar vessel.
Immediately afterward, Kool-Aid Man's sugary innards -- exposed to temperatures only three degrees above absolute zero -- are heated to a boil. They then freeze, crystallize, and spill forth into the cosmos in a crimson (and diabetic) hailstorm.
Next: The Apocalypse, as drawn by an Archie artist
There's a New World Coming
Date: 1974
Publisher: Fleming H. Revell
In the early '70s, Al Hartley, a top artist at the Archie mill, turned his talents to alerting America's children to his evangelical beliefs. Working with Christian publishers Fleming H. Revell, Hartley ran Spire Christian Comics, an imprint that published gems such as Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika (smartly reviewed at Mystery Island) and even some off-brand Archies in which the boy with the hashtag haircut brags about the amount of prayer going on at Riverdale high. (Kliph Nesteroff has put together an exemplary history.)
In this memorable issue, Hartley teamed up with apocalypse profiteer Hal Lindsey, author of the crackpot classic The Late, Great Planet Earth and other really-the-end-is-coming-any-day-now nonsense that continues to this day.
Hartley adapted Lindsey's accounts of the imminent Day of Judgement, which presented some challenges, chief among them, "How does an all-ages comic book handle characters like the Whore of Babylon?"
Hartley cleaned her up, but somehow other filthiness snuck in:
Hartley and Lindsey document all of the now-familiar signs that prove God is thisclose to stopping the car of existence and turning around:
That last panel shows one class where you do not want to see the extra credit assignment.
PostRapture, in the world of the great snatch, the lost souls will be saved by an unlikely source:
This multitude of Billy Grahams -- emerging one after the other from Israel like clowns from a car -- will then instruct the world in a simple message:
THIS IS THE SINGLE DIRTIEST PAGE IN COMIC BOOK HISTORY.
Anyway, when the 144,000 Billy Grahams teach you to drink from your fountain, this is the song they will be grooving to:
Next: The actual Archie stares down history's greatest horror
First, read the bizarre teaser at the bottom of this cover:
Here's a helpful tip: Scramble up those words and write them, in any order, on the back of the paperwork you are given next time you're summoned for jury duty. Then enjoy being home by lunch.
Next: The creepiest field trip
Journey of Discovery with Mark Steel
Date: 1968
Publisher: American Iron and Steel Institute
The Cover Promises: A weekend retreat for male porn stars.
In the 1960s, the tail-end of that "real America" when jobs were plentiful and feelings went unexpressed, schools often shipped their students off on field trips to learn about the great American industries. Today such lessons would involve visiting factories in Juarez, or perhaps a bank of mailboxes in the Cayman Islands, but back then Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry would do.
In fact, the steel industry was so dedicated to youth outreach that it left no child behind, not even a bored, red-socked dandy like Jimmy, seen here awaiting a lap dance:
Another seachange since '68: Back then, Americans found nothing weird about some stranger's giant hand pawing at their children. They also apparently found nothing weird about this guy:
Say what you will about Jimmy, but his fantasies are admirably progressive. After some excitable introductions, this slab of PR beefcake guides Jimmy on a personal tour of all the ways that American steel shapes the world. They shrink down and fly through a steelmaking furnace; they jet over to the airport to examine jets; they study skyscrapers, suspension bridges, locomotives, and even the products in the grocery store.
They get around in Mark Steel's ride.
(It can fly. And it's a submarine!)
And Jimmy marvels at how all-American metals chill the canned sodas Mark Steel uses to win his favor.
Between that and the car, Mark Steel could be the American folk hero for wreckless resource management!
Steel can fly, but he's not ready for the Justice League of America:
Congratulations, Aquaman! "Guard rails" have replaced "fish talking" as the world's worst superpower!
A visit to a paper mill turns weirdly meta:
Jimmy, if there's pictures of you and Mark Steel together, I hope to God they're in a newspaper beneath the words "Amber Alert."
The comic goes on like this, full of steel facts and creepiness, until at last Mark Steel has to go and propagandize elsewhere, quite possibly with old friend Duffman.
They will meet again, but not soon. One day, twenty years later, as he and his co-workers file one last time out of the just-shuttered mill, Jimmy will spy an all-steel limousine slinking past. There, beneath the tinted glass, lurks a sad-eyed man-mountain. For a breath he and Jimmy will regard each other, both lifted and saddened by the dream they once shared. Then that limousine will engage its Mark 1 rocket boosters and zoom up and into the sky.
Hey, you could do worse than following @studiesincrap or @ExhibitionistSF on the Twitter thing.
The mighty Studies in Crap e-mail list alerts you whenever a new SiC post hits. Sign up at studiesincrap@sfweekly.com
