Mr Therm’s Adventures on the Home Front

By the end of the 1950s a new era of affluence was dawning in Austerity Britain. New technologies and home improvements were actively embraced by a grateful populace. Despite being a little long in the tooth, Mr Therm (born 1931) was still doing his bit for the gas industry in the pages of the quintessentially middle class boys’ comic, The Eagle. It may seem like a doomed project to interest adolescent youth in the finer points of home insulation or transforming a hostess trolley but they were very different times. Ian Allan ABCs and I-SPY books offered genuine high-level distraction to youngsters for whom a fruit gum or a minute ice cream wafer that melted and collapsed in an instant was the ultimate in treats. Mr Therm’s adventures appear somewhat overloaded in didactic content and the entertainment value was nugatory despite the occasional lumbering attempts to inject some humour into the proceedings. For many years Mr Therm’s cheery contours had brightened up the exceedingly dull and stuffy world of British consumer advertising but he might have been expected to retire by this point – given the steady rise in Cold War nuclear paranoia in this period, he could well have been relaunched as Mr Thermo-Nuclear. As for his inventor the sober and industrious illustrator, Eric Fraser would dedicate his talents to the world of literature and performance and never again produce anything with the recognition value of Mr Therm. 

Hard Times, Soft Sell

When times are hard and money is in short supply, advertisers are forced to rethink their strategies and fight for every dollar of domestic expenditure. In the Great Depression, new upstart advertising agencies threw away the text heavy, grandiose styles of the 1920s and developed a pared-down model that borrowed the typography and layouts of the tabloid press to suit the mood of the times. This enabled the advertiser to purloin some of the authority of the press, creating the impression that their claims were facts and if the careless reader was confused between promotional and editorial matter, this was no bad thing. At the same time, advertisers became increasingly dependent on another format from the popular press – the strip cartoon. 

The onward march of the Funny Papers into the affections of the American populace generated a small army of highly skilled cartoon artists only too happy to enhance their earnings offering their talents to the advertising industry. Specialists in figure drawing, backgrounds and speech bubbles combined in an assembly line approach to the task as the workload expanded throughout the 1930s. Where artists worked on more than one campaign, great care was taken to conceal their identities. Raymond Rubicam (of Young & Rubicam) was an early adopter and coined the phrase “sequence-picture copy” to avoid the words “cartoon” or “comic” passing his lips. There was no television to compete with print media – only radio and the cinema offered alternative outlets for the advertiser’s message, simultaneously creating opportunities for cross-promotion with personalities from radio and Hollywood frequently migrating into print as cartoon characters. 

Best of all was the ability to address the consumer directly in his or her favoured medium with simple messages and undemanding dialogues delivered by a repertoire of much loved comic book characters. Children clipped them out and pasted them into scrapbooks, extending the reach of the message. For an adult audience they met another corporate objective by putting a human face on to an otherwise impersonal and monolithic corporation such as General Foods. Hostility to the activities of the giants of capitalism ran high in the course of the Depression leading to valiant, if not always successful, campaigns to promote a warm and cuddly presence in the marketplace. Stylistically these examples are very conservative – they display little evidence of the dynamic sense of movement to be seen in adventure comics that would find its way into the visual vocabulary of the 1940s and 1950s. But their two-dimensional quality and the curious blankness of expression offer a certain enigmatic charm all their own. An earlier posting on this subject can be read here. 

Funny Papers – the People’s Choice

There was a time when it was widely believed inside the American advertising industry that they were in the business of engaging the higher faculties of their audience. A lofty dialogue between elevated intellects of equal esteem. These pretensions died a lingering death as the extended passages of purple prose favoured by old school copywriters surrendered to snappy one-liners and vulgar sloganeering. When it was revealed in 1931 via a Gallup survey that almost twice as many newspaper readers preferred the comic section to the news pages in their weekend papers, advertisers abandoned any attempt at educating the consumer and embraced the visual conventions and linear narratives of the comic strip to grab the attention of the public. Mini-dramas expressed in picture sequences with speech balloons were easily digested especially when the services of much loved cartoon characters were engaged. Placing these ads in the pages of the comic sections made for some useful confusion between editorial matter and paid-for publicity. Anxieties about body odour, constipation, bad breath, dandruff, weight problems, insomnia and lifeless hair were dramatised and relieved, courtesy of the astounding virtues of the product. An idle reader was easily deceived into thinking that the special pleading of the advertiser was objective fact. This was taken a stage further when some agencies produced ads that stylistically mimicked reportage to further confuse the public. 

Shifting mountains of unsold breakfast cereal in the direction of young mouths became much easier when producers could address the junior consumer in the medium of their choice. Sales of Grape Nuts were the first to benefit from the comic strip approach, encouraging competitors such as Kellogs (with Mutt and Jeff on board), Cream of Wheat (with the vacuous Li’l Abner) and Ralston (aided and abetted by Dumb Dora) to follow suit. They don’t bear much close examination. The dialogues race along in the conventional manner only to stumble over wordy explanations of the wondrous merits of the foodstuff. The aim of the exercise was not to convince via rational debate but, less ambitiously but more importantly, to associate the product with entertainment values. 

It wasn’t uncommon for dialogues to descend into astonishing inanity, bordering on self-parody. When Pabst brewers employed a comic format, the cartoon characters were lumbered with speech bubbles that in the real world would have lead to a lifetime of incarceration on mental health grounds. But the casual reader would skip the explication and be left with the generalised sense of slightly manic bonhomie communicated through the drawings and hopefully remember Pabst on the next trip to the liquor store. The hero of the Bostitch stapler strip has repackaged his entire existence with the aid of a stapler by the time he staggers into the final frame for a delirious summing-up speech. Elsewhere Scotch tape gets our heroine’s love life back on track by repairing a broken fingernail and mending a torn skirt. It would be callous to be unmoved by the key role of the donut in winning wars as explained here by the apostles of deep-fried cakes, the Donuteers. In another post we will look at how British advertising, visually timid and class-obsessed, slowly took the comic strip on board. 

Reading List:

Roland Marchand     Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley, 1985)
Charles Goodrum     Advertising in America (New York, 1990)
Rick Marschall          Drawing Power (Seattle, 2011)

Modern Wonderland with L Ashwell Wood

Today we revisit the pages of Modern Wonder magazine in 1938-39 and focus on the work of Leslie Ashwell Wood. The editors of Modern Wonder had a team of highly skilled illustrators at their disposal but nobody brought such a stunning exactitude to the cutaway drawing as the man who signed himself L Ashwell Wood. The brilliance of his graphic eviscerations made him the first choice as cover artist in 1938-39 as this selection shows. When he delved beneath the surface of everyday reality, as in the petrol station drawing the results were every bit as fascinating as his responses to the great engineering wonders of the age. A sure and certain indicator of a mid-century middle class childhood was a subscription to the high-minded Eagle comic. This was the respectable face of comics but one of its greatest features was the weekly cutaway drawing from L Ashwell Wood that formed a double spread across the centre pages. Like many of my peers I was absorbed in these infinitely detailed images while elsewhere in the town others of my contemporaries sharpened their invective skills via the scurrilous humour to be found in the pages of The Topper, Beezer, Dandy or Beano. Many of the Eagle drawings have been anthologised and republished in recent decades but the Modern Wonder drawings, the very best he ever produced, remain unpublished as yet.