While scanning through the 1975 b&w magazine KULL AND THE BARBARIANS for my Red Sonja piece, I came across this oddball house ad for Marvel's b&w line.
I've seen a lot of weird approaches to getting readers to subscribe, but invoking the analysis of dream symbols takes the proverbial cake. And the art in which the "dream symbols" appear like nothing more than a standard fantasy-trope: a doughty hero being attacked by a curvy female sending snake-phantoms his way.
Moreover, the art used sports the copyright "1972 by Gary Groth and Bob Kline." What? The enfant terrible of comics fandom, Gary Groth of THE COMICS JOURNAL, once worked for the Evil That Was Marvel Comics?
Well, probably only in a loose technical sense. I don't think Groth was ever an artist, but he had published various fanzines by 1975, and Bob Kline, whom I didn't know, was a popular fan-artist of the period. Probably Kline had some of his art published in one or more of Groth's fanzines, and one or both of them managed to re-sell some of that fan-art to Marvel Comics for spot illustrations like the one in the house ad. That would mean that neither Groth nor Kline had any say as to how the art was used, though it's the only time *I* have seen a spot-illo in a Marvel book being copyrighted by someone outside the company purview. Here's an example of a Kline cover for Groth's FANTASTIC ADZINE, which had a circulation of a thousand copies back in the day.
In 1975, I'm sure the name Gary Groth meant nothing to Marvel employees beyond his fanzine activities. One year later, Groth, Michael Catron and Kim Thompson bought a failing adzine, THE NOSTALGIA JOURNAL, which probably meant they also acquired TNJ's mailing list. The trio then re-fashioned TNJ into THE COMICS JOURNAL, which, whatever Groth claimed in later years, was predominantly just another fanzine back then. Only over time did TCJ become the scourge of industry mediocrity and so on.
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