The Ads of TMNT Adventures (Ongoing 1-4)

While I’d stuck to the TMNT-specific ads last time through looking at ads, this time I’m presenting a more comprehensive look–first at the turtle-specific stuff and then the rest of the ads scattered throughout the first few issues of the ongoing TMNT Adventures series.

While I’d referenced the actual edition before, here’s an ad for that first Comic-and-Cassette from Random House. Nothing terribly special about it, and the whole thing is text and art, not even an actual photo image of the product.

Same with the t-shirts…though it makes more sense with these just to show the art that would appear on the t-shirts. This contrasts markedly with more contemporary advertising using real models to model actual shirts with prints. I suppose I’d consider this ad to be more “pure” on the art side…selling based on the content rather than a model’s looks (incidentally happening to be wearing a shirt being sold).

And here’s an ad for the first video game…notoriously frustrating and hard, particularly compared to the Arcade Game that would come later.

Here, an ad for comics…with an emphasis on TMNT material as well as The Tick.

…and a different ad focused just on the TMNT products, no Tick stuff.

And an ad for New England Comics, listing a bunch of Marvel and DC stuff.

Due to all the images and thus length, the rest of this post is behind the cut below.

An ad for Simon’s Quest–one of those old basic hand-helds with very basic images/animation that (as I recall) were ridiculously simple visually, yet hard and never held my interest personally.

I definitely don’t notice these sorts of ads anymore for all this random “stuff” but it’s definitely a piece from its time.

And now we get to the various Archie “house ads” for stuff in this time period. Firstly above, an ad for some posters.

…an Archie Fan Club.

An ad for a 5-issue digest subscription for $1.75…

And a later ad for those 5-issue digest subscriptions for $2.50. “only” a 75-cent difference, but still a remarkably good deal…particularly for today, 20+ years later!

Two half-page ads for a couple new titles as well as for subscriptions to the various comics…

…and a full-page ad for the new titles.

A PSA for AIDS info…

…and a PSA for the Child Care Action Campaign.

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And that’s that. My guess is that by this point, the ongoing TMNT Adventures series was picking up as a “regular” within Archie, it seems…and so rather than being its own limited series off to the side somewhere with a handful of TMNT-centric ads, it was including a number of house ads and other general ads as (presumably) any other Archie-published book would have.

However, given the quantity of ads…I think going forward, I may pull some out for an occasional post, but I held myself up quite awhile with not feeling up to scanning and cropping and getting set to post…rather than keeping to the weekly schedule for this blog that I’d intended.

Now that this is posted, I should be getting back on-track with TMNT Adventures #5, which is the point I feel the series really began, and begins what came to BE the TMNT Adventures universe, rather than just a series of tv-episode adaptations.