The Most Disturbing Thing I've Seen This Week--Underdog

There's no need to fear--your inflatable love doll is here!!

Wait..back up...let's start again.

This week's quarter bin find is Underdog #1 (1970), from our friends at Charlton.

There's nothing too exceptional about the actual content of this book...it's just your bog-standard kiddie comic version of a popular cartoon. Clean, cartoonish illustration, inoffensive and unchallenging writing.

But this mag is home to some of the most...well, let's say mis-aimed...advertising I've seen in a comic, not to mention disturbing.

Sure, there are the usual small print ads for the useless trinkets we lusted after as children, and ads to sell GRIT and seeds, record clubs to join, sea monkeys, body building, and the like. All typical for any comic of the 70's.

But inside the front cover, they give us this:

Now, this is no trinket jewelry they're hawking here: these are adult rings, and the cheapest one is $140 bucks, which was a fair chunk o' change in 1970:

The others go as high as $249, which leads me to the question. This is a 15¢ comic book. A 15¢ children's comic book, for little children. Did they really think there were a lot of wee tots walking around with spare Benjamins to blow on bling?

But wait, there's this:

They were expecting a lot of military men to be reading Underdog #1? Yeah, I know, a lot of GI's did read comics, etc, etc. But enough to justify this ad? And somehow, the image of Martin Sheen heading upriver in Nam, reading a copy of Underdog between firefights, kinda freaks me out.

But not as much as this:

Go ahead. Click on it. Look at it's full-sized glory. Underdog #1 features an ad for a Life Size Inflatable Doll.

Oh, sure, they try to make it sound like it's for the kiddies (and yes, they were incompetent enough to to make the model's blouse the same color as the typeface, so some of the ad is not readable):

But c'mon...the 28 references to it being lifelike in every detail? It comes with pajamas and a bikini? "I'm the most unusual gift that you can give to yourself?" These poses:

I'm sorry, but there's only one conclusion. Sex doll. Being sold in a young kids' comic book. Which is being read by the troops in Nam as they frag their lieutenant. Maybe they're buying diamond rings for their Judy Doll...

Hmmm, I wonder if the coupon still works...