The Fabuleous Fifties

The Adams Family

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Some time ago, I showed a long run of black and white comic strip ads from the early sixties for Viceroy cigarettes. They were remarkable, because at that point the whole use of comic strips to sell stuff (especially cigarettes) was pretty much over. Johnstone and Cushing, the company that provided the artwork for such projects, would closeit's doors only a couple of years later and many of it's key employees had already left (many of which to do their own newspaper strips, which is how good they were). The other reason it is remarkable, is because the last few (including my only color copy) seem to have been done by a young Neal Adams. Adams started out at Johnstone and Cushing (well, sort of - he did stuff before that, but let's say he started here) where he always claimed to have learned the ropes from staff employee Elmer Wexler. Strangely enough some of his better known work was for the Chip Martin series of ads for Bell Telephone, which were printed in Boy's Life. There he took over from Tom Scheuer and it seemed to me that Scheuer had a big influence on Adams as well.

Anyway, these Viceroy ads look as if it's Wexler and Adams, although I can't rule out any involvement by Schreuer. Some of the poses seem a lot like his work to me. I still hope he drops by one of these days and tells us how it is. Tom Schreuer is still with us as Tom Sawyer, the name he took for his second career as tv writer (Murder, She Wrote).

So without much further ado - having adone all that - here is the black and white run of Viceroy ads again, with color replacements from a lot I bought recently. I have got all of them yet, but I am getting there.