Found: Comic book ads of the future

Transgenic Sea Monkeys, smart Whoopee cushions, & X-Ray Spex that actually work​
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​One of my favorite projects when I was an editor at Wired magazine was the monthly back-page item Found: Artifacts From the Future. Each installment was a full-page image of some found object from a speculative near future. All explanation of what the object was and how it worked had to be diegetic—i.e., the page had to explain itself entirely through context and in situ text, with no annotation or caption. This was a great challenge for me as a writer/editor and for all of the designers, illustrators, and photographers I had the pleasure of working with. These pages never made much of an impact online because the fun was always in the fine print—which rarely came through at web resolution. I’m republishing them here to drill down on those cool details.

This piece ran in the July 2007 issue of Wired, and it might be the best Found page ever. Any Boomer or Gen-Xer who read a comic book knows about that page of ads in the back that always offered all sorts of wonderful doodads and gizmos, and anyone who ever convinced their parents to let them get one knows that they never worked as advertised. They disappeared by the early 1990s, partly due to tighter regulations of just how cruelly misleading ads targeted at kids were allowed to be.

My premise for this piece was that in the future, Moore’s Law and manufacturing efficiencies (and lax safety regulations) would allow these cheap novelty products to actually did what they were supposed to do. And the sea monkeys were actual tiny aquatic monkeys.
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Every product on the page is a riff on an actual product you’d see in comic-book ads from 1950-1990, and the copy mimics the voice of the original sales pitches. But what makes the page so distinctive are the visuals that were overseen by my friend and colleague, the extraordinary designer Jeremy LaCroix. He enlisted the artist Mark Matcha to do the retrofuturistic illustrations, and he laid the page out himself, maintaining the wonky text formatting of the original, with Todd Tankersley snapping the photo.

Detailed close-ups of the art below, paired with page copy and interspersed with notes in brackets and italics. Finally, a full scan of the page.

[We stole several panels of the actual minicomic that ran with the famous Charles Atlas “Hero at the Beach” ad for his Dynamic Tension exercise regimen—the one that inspired the character Flex Mentallo. The photo of the bodybuilder is a licensed image from Corbis, but the designer Jeremy pushed his eyes apart to make him look more goony and artificially enhanced. The copy I wrote riffs on the actual ad, as well as classic parodies of that ad from Monty Python and The Who Sell Out.]​
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[I remember that my colleague Adam Rogers is the one who suggested that the futuristic high-tech Whoopee! cushion should emit sulfur and methane for added realism. We actually registered the site acmenoveltywarehouse.com and I posted a redirect to the article on the Wired site there.]

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