"Hi Folks - Uncle Bernie wants all the children (and grown-ups too) to be happy! In this latest Novelty Mart catalog you will find fun galore and new excitement for the entire family, year-round entertainment and delights for all the children -- handy useful novelties to fascinate the grown-ups.
You will be thrilled with the magnificent assortment of exciting action toys, novelties, and housewares. You will be delighted with their fine quality and workmanship. You will be absolutely amazed at their rock bottom prices --- sensationally low priced because we're the largest mail order firm of its kind in the country. So just turn these pages for a remarkable PARADE OF VALUES. And feel perfectly safe in ordering any of them. Remember! Every item you choose has Novelty Mart's full unconditional guarantee..."
------ Uncle Bernie ------
Thus goes the pitch from Bernie himself opening up his 1953 catalog, issued from their regular address of 59 East Eighth Street, New York 3, NY. In my last post here at the Beware of the Blog Comic Supplement we briefly examined Uncle Bernie's mail order outfit and its possible tangential relationship to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention which then dovetails into comic book ads in general and some other areas of folk Americana / arcana / ephemera that bubble and boil just beneath the surface of wide public consciousness. The comic book publishing business could be sketchy enough, but the folks that advertised in pulp magazines, digests and comics could run the gamut of flim-flammery. All harmless and good fun for the family, usually cheap, but sometimes with price-tags quite high for their day. Old junk that gives you a wistful feeling when you realize it was probably better manufactured junk in its day than one could find now.
Welcome to the comic book sideshow, my friends. Right this way - join me after the jump!
Let's begin our descent into the depths of Novelty Mart with a gallery of several early 1950s comic book ads from different publishers, one in particular featuring the infamous Portable Wall Shower, a rather racy image for its day.
I particularly like the garish 'red background' series of ads, which are somewhat more attractive than others of this type in comic books. I also don't think that their prices are really much lower than their competitors in this area of merchandise. The same comic books often have several outfits hawking very similar products so the hyperbole was an essential ingredient in their full page ads.
Here's a better look at that handy shower device shown in the upper right ad:
This certainly would have caught my eye as a young boy. And that is one huge shower-head, it's a doggoned sunflower! And all of these at $2.98, the magical price.
Here's one last one, with a different color design:
This is the only ad (above) I have seen where the Little Bandit slot machine ("Pays off in fun!") appears, it is not included in the full 1953 catalog below. Since this type of 60 year old catalog is rare to begin with, and rarely shown online in their entirety we're giving you the whole thing, all 32 pages of it, as a cool example of its genre, including the order blank, and a self-addressed paid envelope provided to the customer.
As you will see, there are a lot of handy household gadget 'novelties' mixed liberally in with toys, tricks and oddities. After the catalog we'll look at the Zappa / Uncle Bernie 'connection'.
I like Blinky the switchplate, above right - he sounds creepy, with his opening and closing eyes!
Note the revision to the Portable Wall Shower art - here in the catalog we find her in all her dripping glory, but (further up above) the color comic book ad version has had more 'water lines' drawn in to obscure her butt, and a paste-up over her lovely behind as well, partly for space, but I imagine also partly for modesty!
The Tele-Chek is brilliant!
Several fun items in this spread; I like the Barrel of Fun text: "It's scientifically made, it's crazy {.} It appears simple but it actually ain't so.", the Fall Guy, a "3 and a half inch boxed carved figurine", and the U-Build-It hot rod and plane look enjoyable, I love the clear hood/fuselage with primary-colored working parts.
Nice ad copy in this catalog. I've certainly seen a lot worse!
I would have really dug the lineman and truck toy as a child.
Another good page - several intriguing items on display, and "No water enters the child's mouth."
I'll bet that poor line drawing of the mask doesn't begin to do it justice. Perhaps someone reading this will know of a photo of the actual "With Imitation Bump" mask and forward it our way. For that matter, any photos of these actual products are welcome, I can't afford to collect them, but love to look at 'em.
"Bomb-a-Ship / Here's a big hit! Release the bomb from the plane. If you hit the target, battleship explodes into 8 parts. Of course you can put it together again easily for more play and the explosion's perfectly harmless..."
"Bend Me Monkey" (above, right) ...Well, say no more.
Sock the Moon
Brand new idea indeed! This is one of my favorite items in the catalog. What a sadistic little bastard this is. How long will it take before the child is running to Mama in tears after trying out this mother? Not very long, I'll wager. Points to the child-hater that invented this delightful toy.
Now this one is just charming. Lovely, goofy text and an upside-down art paste-up.
That is some crazy gravity-defying putty!
Although not quite as sexy as the Portable Wall Shower, the Sit-Down Shower is rather spicy.
Positioning it right across from Door Peek only makes it worse.
Killer Kane is a nice concept as a product and I love the name! Perfect for a comic book ad.
As yet it is uncertain whether our Uncle Bernie depicted so far is the model for Frank Zappa's version, as written by him some 15 years later, but I like to think it's possible that Zappa, as a comic book appreciator, might have remembered the various 'Uncle' characters used in comic book ad pitches when he wanted a nice four-syllable name for an evil toy pusher.
As far as I've seen, the Uncle Bernie comic book ads ended long before the 1967 album, Absolutely Free, containing the Uncle Bernie's Farm piece.
Below we see pages from the libretto for the album, and I had to include Zappa's introductory text for the people who had to special-order the document.
Among the examples on the short list of really memorable or creepy comic book ads from my youth in the 1960s is our next exhibit, a lovely and twisted full-pager from a cover-dated April 1968 Marvel comic book. I recall being intrigued and confused by this one well before I even knew exactly who the band was. Similar to my reactions to very early examples of Robert Crumb art before he really hit nationally. There was just something there...
The art is by the brilliant designer Cal Schenkel, with the ad copy by Zappa.
Next we have "Uncle" Harry Bard, as he appeared in an issue of Mystery in Space comics in 1951, fronting for the American Specialty Co.
Following Uncle Harry is his sinister counterpart, Uncle Louie, from an hilarious MAD magazine comic book ad parody from the 1950s. I don't know the exact issue that this tasty ad appeared in, as my copy is from a 1970s summertime MAD Super-Special comic book insert reprint. The Uncle Louie page is more of a riff on the subscription-sales rackets for kids like American Seeds, the various greeting card outfits, and worst of all, those poor kids trying to peddle Cloverine Brand Salve to snag prizes and cash. Just the same, I felt it appropriate to include him here with Uncle Bernie, as they all give a wink and a nudge to each other.
And a closer look at Uncle Louie pal... perhaps a MAD scholar knows who did the painting of Louie.
Do ya cry Uncle yet? Well..I do. If this encourages anyone to give that terrific Mothers album Absolutely Free a listen, all the better. Those old 1950s Harvey Kurtzman-edited MADs are always worth another look, too.
Until we meet again in two weeks, strap on your Willie Wolf Glasses to show the high level of 'couth that you possess from lifelong comic book mind rot. And, as I said earlier, I highly encourage anyone with stories about Novelty Mart or Uncle Bernie to write to me here via this blog, as the world of carny/novelty/magic fans out there would greatly appreciate it!
NEW UPDATES TO THIS ORIGINAL POST:
Here (below) is a Novelty Mart ad from 1950 with NO Uncle Bernie in evidence!
Otherwise, much like the 1951 ads.
And below, to further deepen the mystery of 'Uncle Bernie', we have a small ad from a 1948 comic book for the 'Bernard Fine Co., Inc.', doing business from 501 Sixth Avenue, Dept. TCC in New York. It uses the same artwork that we've seen in the Novelty Mart ads, and can it be completely coincidental that it is named after a 'Bernard Fine'? That seems to stretch it a bit for me. I suspect that Bernard Fine IS our 'Uncle Bernie', and that this outfit later became Novelty Mart, at their new address, by 1950.
Only more time and research will tell.
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