Saturday Smooth Scalp Day.
In the short history if newspaper comic strip ads (say, between 1935 and 1960) there were some companies that spent more money in this field then others. Big players were the cigarette companies, which used comics to advertise their various brands. The soap manufacterors were also very active, as were the producers of oilbased products. One of them was Vasiline, which came from Unilever. They made an oil based jelly that used to be best know for it's use as a hair gel. these days it is more often used as an neutral skin mostener and eh... other stuff. In the sampling I am sharing here, we see it used for hair gel in a 1944 ad drawn by Johnstone and Cushing regular Sargent. After the war, two new series were started by two of the Johnstone and Cushing mainstays. Rusty and Dusty was a long running adventure series drawn by Elmer Wexler. My samples run from the late fifties to at least 1956. In a mid fifties Johnstone and Cushing booklet he was specifically named as the artist behind this bi-weekly series. Soon after it became a hit, it was joined by another Vaseline ad, this time more funny, starrtinh to twin brats. This one tier addition looks like it was drawn or at least developed by Dik Browne and it is often mentioned as the strip that got him hired to do Hi & Lois. Still, pretty soon it seems to have been taken over by Bill Williams, in a similar but slightly different syle.
