1 The death of a fad. For a while, wearing trucker hats ironically was a hip trend, particularly among celebrities like Ashton Kutcher. You know a trend has ended the “hip” stage of its life when you start having Marvel Comics cover trucker hats.
2 Is that the Amazing Man?! In 2010 Colgate ran an extensive series of ads in DC Comics coinciding with the seventhy-fifth anniversary of the comic book company. The premise of the ads was celebrating seventy-five years of “the hero getting the girl.” To demonstrate this, each week they showed a different notable DC cover or piece of art featuring characters kissing. The problem is that there really aren’t that many examples of this on superhero covers and if you want to have a racially diverse character, the examples are even fewer. This led to a national ad campaign using a cover featuring Amazing Man and Maxima, two of DC’s most obscure superheroes (and both of whom had been killed off years earlier, Amazing Man in 1998 and Maxima in 2001).
3 Hey, did I mention how awesome avocado was? In 2011, DC and Subway launched a four-part series of comic book inserts featuring famous athletes (as well as Subway spokesperson Jared Fogle) encountering DC superheroes in comic book stories that also, of course, involve the delicious goodness of Subway sandwiches. If you didn’t know that Subway now has avocado in their sandwiches, you certainly will after you see the tenth athlete mention it in one of these ads. While seeing Laila Ali and Jared Fogle hanging out in the fourth one is pretty trippy, I am going to pick the second one as my favorite, simply for the absurdity of Blake Griffin of the Los Angeles Clippers bumping into Carl Edwards (of NASCAR fame) at a Subway and Edwards giving him a ride in his race car (where they come across the Justice League fighting Gorilla Grodd and his army of evil gorillas, leading Blake and Carl to lend a hand). Nothing is quite as awesome as hearing Blake and Carl say (trading off lines at the ellipses), “Sorry, Grodd. Your mind control doesn’t work on us…we’re not tired…because we ate right at Subway…and got energized by the avocado, the superfood for the everyday hero!”
4 Bam! Pow! Comics aren’t for kids anymore! That is the basic message I get from seeing Harley-Davidson promote its motorcycles on the back of Marvel Comics in 2011. It is one thing to advertise the fact that Captain America drives one in the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger. That’s just Marketing 101. But how many people do they really expect to want to buy a motorcycle because they saw it advertised on the back of a comic book?
