Decades later, this puzzles me.You never saw that in Golden Age books...but then again, those books rarely had stories interrupted by ads. Most books had multiple stories, and if there were interior ads, they appeared between stories.
So maybe, as longer stories became more common, and interior advertising became more prevalent, comic book companies feared that readers couldn't deal with a story being interrupted for an ad or two.
Did they really believe that, when a a couple of pages of advertising appeared, we would think the comic was over? "Well, that story was only 3 pages long, I guess...sure, it ended kind of abruptly, but there are commercials, so the whole thing must be over. The next 29 pages must all be ads and crap. Might as well stop reading here! Hell, might as well throw the comic away!!"
Fortunately, these little blurbs saved us that embarrassment. "Whoa--it says here the story is continued!! Who knew?? I guess I can keep turning the pages now!! Thank you, comic book makers, for enabling me to keep reading!!"
Seriously, they must have thought their readers were pretty dumb...
yesterday I was wondering about the same thing!
ReplyDelete~saranga
And sometimes they were super-helpfully specific - 'Continued on third page following'.
ReplyDeleteI hated Marvel's Seventies, 17pp habit of arranging every page as a spread, bar the first.
Remember, these were the same guys that thought the pre-Crisis multiple Earths were confusing and needed to be eliminated.
ReplyDeleteThis issue is very confusing and hard to follow.
ReplyDeleteOn this page we have the Justice league rushing to save Star City from the killer asteroid, and then I turn the page to find this fellow and his girlfriend at the beach. Who is this fellow, what is his connection to the Justice League, and why is the large stranger kicking sand on and then threatening to assault him. Why hasn't the Flash come to help? And look how this page is in black and white, the entire art appears cheap and rushed. Then we get a page and a half of Green Lantern making a giant green fishing net, only to be confronted with something called Cap's Hobbies. Who is this Cap? Is he an associate of HGreen Arrow or Snapper Carr? Is he a villain??
I would almost be tempted to ignore entire pages of this book, but I'm sure if they intended for me to do that, they would inicate so in some manner....
This is very confusing...