Date

1-14-2026

Department

School of Communication and the Arts

Degree

Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design (MFA)

Chair

Christopher Todd Clark

Keywords

Graphic Design, Visual Communication, Design Research, Comic Book Advertising, Comic Book Mail-Order Ads, Mid-Twentieth-Century Comic Books, Golden Age Comic Books, Advertising History, Youth-Targeted Advertising, Consumer Culture, Persuasive Design, Visual Rhetoric, Semiotics, Hyperreality, Media Theory, Nostalgia, Popular Media, Print Ephemera, Illustration, Typography, Narrative Imagery, Visual Analysis, Cultural Studies, Design Ethics, Archival Research, Historical Visual Culture

Disciplines

Art and Design

Abstract

This thesis examines the psychological, cultural and iconic influence of mid-20th-century comic book advertising and its enduring influence on modern marketing. With a concentration on adolescent readership, it examines how advertisements in comics shaped consumerist behavior through aspirational discourse, gendered address and emotional manipulation. Through literature reviews, visual analyses and case studies—such as the Charles Atlas bodybuilding campaign, Sea Monkeys and X-ray glasses—this research investigates the rhetorical strategies and ethical ramifications of advertising to children.

The objectives are fivefold: (1) to inventory and analyze dominant advertising strategies employed in comic book ads, (2) to explore how they reinforced cultural and gender norms, (3) to compare historical practices with contemporary Online advertising and (4) to shed light on ethical concerns in advertising to children. A mixed-methods approach—combining qualitative content analysis with interpretive case studies—was used to scrutinize both primary artifacts and secondary sources through the lens of cultural and psychological theory.

Findings demonstrate that comic book advertisements were designed to exploit the psychological state of teenage readers through the use of urgency, scarcity, visual narrative and promise of transformation. These strategies persist in modern Online advertising, where emotional manipulation and identity formation remain central to persuasion. Gendered appeals—adventure and strength for boys and beauty and domesticity for girls—played a significant role in shaping postwar cultural values and continue to guide advertising discourse today.

The artistic product of this research is a portfolio of designed work that analytically explores the legacy of comic book advertising. It seeks not only to expose the machinations of historical and current persuasive efforts but also to posit ethical approaches to youth marketing, offering historical context along with forward-looking design solutions for responsible visual communication.

As I have spent years collecting and researching old comic books, I have found myself fascinated by the bizarre world hidden behind their pages: the advertisements. They were not trivial fluff pieces or offbeat curiosities; they were selling identity, transformation and prestige to children who were still learning about themselves. I remember staring at the pages—X-ray Specs with superhuman powers, Sea Monkeys that made aquariums into kingdoms and Charles Atlas fitness programs that promised to make a “98-pound weakling” into a rippling giant. Even if I couldn’t afford those products, the possibilities they represented lingered in my mind. The fantasizing, imagining how my life might be otherwise, had a lasting effect. In retrospect, I realize that these ads not only conditioned my want but conditioned the psycho-emotional underpinnings of an entire generation.

This individual interest leads to the crux of my research: how mid-20th-century comic book advertisements conditioned young consumer psychology, reinforced gender and cultural norms and helped create the foundations of today’s advertising protocols. While comic book scholarship as such has evolved significantly in the last several decades, much of this has concentrated on comic book stories, characters and issues concerning comic book storytelling. Rather little consideration has been given to the ads themselves, which were often as influential and persuasive as the stories with which they appeared. These ads functioned as miniature case studies in consumer manipulation—combining bold typography, sensational claims and visual storytelling to promise transformation and belonging.

Scholars such as Bradford Wright, in Comic Book Nation, have traced how comics reflected the values and aspirations of American youth, but the advertising tucked within them has remained a secondary concern (Wright 23). Works such as Terry Sadowski’s Hey Skinny! and Kirk Demarais’s Mail-Order Mystiques capture the irony and retrograde appeal of the ads but only touch on their psychological resonance (Sadowski 45; Demarais 24). Cultural thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard were able to position these ads as something more than novelties: as hyper-real surrogates for childhood wishes, terrors and anticipations. Marshall McLuhan can be employed to further explain how the media brokered society’s understanding (McLuhan 68). The endurance of these tactics of persuasion into contemporary digital marketing—present in influencer sponsorships, gamified promotion and social media exclusives—indicates that comic book advertising represents a crucial missing link in the broader history of marketing.

The knowledge gap that this thesis seeks to resolve resides at the crossroads of the history of advertising, consumer psychology and design studies. Although comic books have been considered cultural commodities for many years, very little specialized scholarship explores comic book advertising’s visual rhetoric and psychological dynamics and little has been attempted to investigate how these mid-century methods directly equate to contemporary youth marketing in digital and social media spaces. Understanding this heritage is essential: the same identity promises of transformation, belonging and now persist in shaping children’s commercials on YouTube, TikTok and gaming websites.

Drawing on this foundation, my objectives are fivefold:

Compare prevailing methods to advertising practice in comic book commercials during the 1940s and 1970s.

Evaluate how these practices reinforced cultural value and gender expectations.

Compare historical practice with current digital advertisements targeting children.

Discuss the ethical implications of advertising on children.

Translate research findings into authored deliverables that critique and reinterpret comic book advertising heritage.

These objectives lead to the following research questions:

How did mid-century comic book advertising shape youth consumer psychology?

How did these ads reflect and reinforce cultural and gender norms?

What ethical considerations emerge when comparing historical comic book ads with contemporary youth-targeted advertising?

How are “golden age” comic book advertising tactics continuing to impact digital and social media marketing today?

The worth of this research lies in its twofold contribution to history and practice. It positions comic book advertisement as significant but overlooked part of design and advertisement history, demonstrating how effective visual communication drove young consumers’ desires and identities. On the other hand, it gives contemporary significance by drawing out lessons applicable to today’s marketers and designers. By subjecting such ancient tactics to critical examination, we can uncover how deeply ingrained they resonate in today’s digital and identify avenues towards more ethical youth advertising.

My readers will include advertising scholars, cultural historians, communication theory folks and practicing designers. Yet this book also has a message for anyone who is interested in the picture’s role in fashioning youth culture and consumer culture. In looking at these comic book ads, I want to not only learn more about the past but to illuminate the ways that we might be more accountable in the future with regard to visual communication.

Briefly put, this thesis is more than a sentimental manifesto. It is about how one generation of children learned to imagine through advertising, how that imagining carried over into modern marketing and how design history can teach us about how to rethink youth-directed communication with imagination and integrity.

Summary

This chapter has located the mid-twentieth-century comic book advertising in their historical and cultural context. It has elaborated on how the combination of visual storytelling, post-war optimism, and psychological manipulation created a new kind of persuasion directed toward young readers. Comic book advertisements have been found operating not merely as sales tools but as instruments of identity formation-offering transformation, empowerment, and belonging through acts of consumption. Situating these artifacts within broader shifts in culture and media, this chapter thus laid the foundation for understanding exactly how the visual language of persuasion evolved into a resilient paradigm for modern marketing.

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