Thursday, February 1, 2018

0063: Pay As You Glow

The comic scan on the right is from a 1974 promotional comic printed by Custom Comics, Inc. There is no indicia per se, just that date, name and the address "10 W.19th St., N.Y.C." on the bottom of the second page. There's also no cover in the sense of a slick paper outer cover carrying trade dress such as a publisher name, price, date, distributor's mark,  etc. The yellow strip at the bottom does indicate the region where it was intended to be given away; the same cover (and I have to guess the same interior) was used for Pennsylvania and Southern California.

"Massachusetts Electric" is self explanatory. For those of you outside New England, "Granite State" refers to New Hampshire and Narragansett is in Rhode Island. The same title was used for promotional comics with different covers, albeit with the same nuclear family. [That both is and isn't a pun, so I'm now wondering if it would have made a better title for the post.] I've found some of those other covers online stamped for other regions.

The whole thing is 16 pages, a roughly even mixture of schematics and stock commercial art illustrations mixed with panels forming a story that I'm willing to bet were drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger. In 1974, Schaffenberger became a focus of attention when DC combined three titles (SUPERMAN'S PAL JIMMY OLSEN, SUPERMAN'S GIRLFRIEND LOIS LANE and SUPERGIRL) starring characters he had drawn, at one time or another, into a single extra-length title SUPERMAN FAMILY. It prompted the obvious question, "If you have three series you were going to cancel for flagging sales, what makes you think that the fans of each (let alone more fans) will pay more to get any one of them?" Well, somebody did because SUPERMAN FAMILY lasted another eight years. After the Three Mile Island incident in the late 1970's, these pro-nuclear energy tracts (which had been common since the 1950's) gave way to pro-computer (and pocket calculator) tracts sponsored by Radio Shack. By then, it became more common for the creative teams to be credited, which is helpful when dealing with artists who aren't quite as instantly recognizable as Schaffenberger.

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