"Them thar Tootsie Rolls sure put steam inta yer muscles, don't they?" It's time for another round of stupid comic books ads lovingly critiqued by the wise guys at SeanBaby.com.

"Captain Tootsie" has a bad-ass military-issue rifle equipped with an infra-red sniper-scope and a fluorescent eyepiece. But "You don't need a sniperscope to spot the gosh-a-mighty goodness of chewy, chocolaty Tootsie Rolls," he reminds us. And one bad ad is underway.

It seems that a military rifle would come in handy if a killer bear were rampaging through a campground of little girls. But here's how that scenario gets rendered by the artist of the comic book ad.

"Wow! Listen to that excitement!"
"Screech! Eek!"

And so on and so on....

Seanbaby has assembled a new collection of ads so jaw-droppingly bad that it's impossible to resist heckling them. ("I have no idea what Tootsie Rolls have to do with murdering bears," Seanbaby notes.) Though he's famous for de-constructing dozens of 70s ads in which Marvel and DC superheros pimped Hostess Fruit Pies, Seanbaby reminds us of that truly bad comic book advertising transcends the entire comic book universe.

He's discovered another gem where two small children frighten an escaped gorilla with weapons that they earned selling White Cloverine-brand Salve. They weren't plastic weapons, one Pigdog reader believes. "Dude. It was the seventies.... You actually could get a .22 caliber rifle from selling cloverine salve.

"We live in a different world today...."

Indeed. Another extremely violent ad even features Sam Spade.

If there's one upside to bad comic book advertising, it's this. Besides the thrilling cultural vertigo you get from seeing ads that are hopelessly outdated -- it's also really, really entertaining to watch someone making fun of them.

Check it out yourself

vagrant@pigdog.org