Tooting my own horn

Wednesday Advertising Day.

As I seem to be doing comic book stories the whole week, I thought I'd share some more Captain Tootsie ads. They were run by just about every comic book company from roughly 1945 to 1955. A list of all available titles has never been made, but I believe someone at the FCA is working on it. The early ones were done by C.C. Beck, after which Bill Schreiber and Pete Costanza joined in. Some of them were either done as newspaper ads as well and it would seem to me the comic book ones were adaptations of the newpaper ones. Frankly, it's a mess. All I can do is collect them whenever I come across them, which I don't even do religiously. I have show quite a few before and there maybe doubles. But a part of me thinks it would be nice if a complete list can one day be made.

Beck and All

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Captain Tootsie was one of the longer running comic style ad campaigns. It started somewhere in the midfifties, with ads for Sunday pages and comic books. As far as I can see, the same ads were used for both purposes, although I have never seen a 'life' conversion. Paul Hamerlinck of the FCA is preparing a complete list of all Captain Tootsie's comic book appearances, but if he wants to do a list of all newspaper samples as well, he'll have a couple of problems. First of all, most of these ads do not appear in NewspapaerArchive, so it he will need accces to a lot of papers to compile a complete list. And they will have to cover a large time sread as well, as I have seen these ads appearing from somewhere in the late forties until the mid fifties. As far as I know these ads were on a regular two week rotation, which seems to have been the norm for most newspaper ad strips. So there may be as many as 250 of them. At first they were signed by C.C. Beck, but later they seem to have been taken over by Peter Costanza (in the same style). Sometimes Beck and Costanza signed together, so they may have had some sort of joined operation.

On top of that, there also seem to have been smaller black and white streamer typ ads, which appeared both in daily and Sunday newspapers. These were always signed by Beck himself, whatever that means. For these ads, which you can only find by accidentally coming across them in papers and on NewspaperArchive, I have found multiple instances of the same ad being used on different dates. Wether the same thing was going on in the Sundays ads I don't know.

Here are three more of the streamers I found in 1947. The link will take you to my 1948 samples. After that two Sunday samples from 1950. By then the signing name is Bill Schreiber.