Several things strike me about this ad. First... well, it's Kubert. Oddly, though, he's not really doing sequential art here. It's set up like a comic book, certainly, but the individual panels bear no real relation to one another, and are held together exclusively by the captions. If it weren't for the T-Rex breaking out of the bottom panel, I'd almost think these were done as five separate pieces of art.
Next, why Tarzan? The sales gimmick itself has no relation to Burrough's creation, but they clearly went out of their way to secure the right to use him here. Further, they got the big Tarzan artist of the time (Joe Kubert, if you weren't paying attention) to do the art.
Third, it's not immediately clear what the ad is for. "Tarzan" is the largest text on the page, with "Pom Poms" being second, but most of the actual content focuses on the Aurora model kits. You've actually got to get pretty far into the ad before you get the idea of what they're selling.
Fourth, the T-Rex is colored red, much like Jack Kirby's Devil Dinosaur -- who wouldn't appear in print for another two years. Having actually done research on Devil Dinosaur, I'm surprised to see this because there essentially were no color variations on dinosaurs at that point in popular culture -- they were all muted greens and greys. I'm left to wonder if Jack saw this ad (it was his comic after all) and appropriated the visual for Devil. We could well be looking at the original Devil Dinosaur!
0 comments:
Post a Comment