One of my favorite random facts about the ancient world is that it had just as much commercialism as our own time. Archeologists regularly discover carvings on, say, 3000-year-old temples that thank such and such an individual for donating the money necessary for the building's construction. Beside every scrap of sanctity in human culture there is a reminder of the messy, mundane necessities, money being one of them. For all the imagination and adventure of comic books, they've always been a business venture and thus fueled by advertisements. But just because they're shamelessly searching for the reader's disposable income doesn't mean there isn't an art to the ads. Often times, the pages that pay for the comics are just as fascinating as the comics themselves.

In Uncanny X-Men #1 the first ad is a fairly common one for the Dynaflex muscle building system. It's as perfect a pitch as Marvel could have wanted. For one, the guy whose name is on the scheme is a bodybuilder called Mike Marvel and the product is exactly the kind of thing that superhero-obsessed boys would want. It's a cheap, supposedly easy way to become big and tough without having to go through all of the embarrassment of exercising in public. Just like the books themselves, products like the Dynaflex system broker in fantasy.

Most of the ads in those 1960's comics plugged into one kind of geekery or another. They cast a broad net to capture the piggy banks of junior audiophiles with home recording kits, science-minded nerds who like the idea of growing sea monkeys and history buffs who might be convinced to start a rare coin collection.

Some of my favorite shills come at the back of the book where the cheaper bulk ads implore kids to pick up sports almanacs and stamp collections. You'll also find several versions of a fairly ubiquitous mill of the 60's, the poem-into-song service. In just about every newspaper, magazine and comic book in America there were ads that promised aspiring poets a custom recording of their verse in song. This was a laughably cynical co-opting of the folk movement that presciently dipped into the pockets of gullible singer-songwriter wannabes who had just enough loose cash and vanity to submit their poetry for "review". Of course every submission was one of the lucky few to get the Joan Baez treatment.

These ads are the very essence of childhood. They're artifacts of fancy and aspiration, but also of disillusionment and disappointment. Surely countless young people got their first taste of the world's less sunny side through cheap toys, expensive scams and broken promises of fast wealth purchased from comic book advertisements.

By the time the 1980's rolled around, comics like X-Men started to skew to a slightly older and somewhat broader demographic, so the ads followed suit. Gone were the muscle systems and too-good-to-be-true fame generators. Instead comics became host to Saturday morning cartoon ads and promotions of sugary snacks. Maybe as comics became less niche over time the producers started to hold them to a higher standard, or maybe the new generation of kids just weren't as easy to dupe. Whatever the case, those old advertisements are things of the past, and likely for good.