DC Treasury Ads

These ads always got my pulse racing as a kid--seeing the covers of all these books I missed made me want to rip the page right out of the comic and order them....if I had had any money.

An oft-repeated quote from then-DC publisher Carmine Infantino about the treasuries is: "I tried everything I possibly could. Those things, strangely enough, sold well by mail and eventually we sold them out, but when they were on the newsstands, they never did that well."

Which would explain why DC had so many ads in their regular titles for the treasuries--they knew who the audience was, and was marketing directly to them. So they had their finest in-house designers whip up a whole host of ads pushing the treasuries.

One of things about the multi-book ads that I noticed even as a young kid was when they'd plaster a box with "Sold Out" over a certain title(see BELOW). It gave you the buyer such a sense of urgency--these were selling so fast they didn't even have time to re-do the ad! It made you want to get in your order for Secret Origins of the Super-Villains all that much faster.

I'm coming across more and more of these ads, many more than I ever knew existed!