Tag Archives: comic books Halloween

Comic book ads: Haunted house bank

haunted house bank comic book ad

Here’s an ad I remember even if I didn’t have the product it advertised.

The Haunted House Mystery Bank looked cool in the ad and videos I’ve seen online suggested it was indeed cool. You place a penny in a particular spot and the doors open and a ghostly figure comes out and grabs the coin.

The bank was battery operated and made of metal, but I love the ad – which appeared in comics in the 1960s – itself. The artwork is cool and primitive and the copy is appropriately breathless and jokey at the same time.

Online sources indicate this was a “Disney Haunted Mansion” bank, but I’m not sure about that. Check out that ad. No mention of Disney. You’d think they would have marketed the product with the Disney name.

That price, by the way, separated a lot of us out of the possibility of buying this bank. How many kids in the 1960s had six bucks for something from a comic book ad? How many kids had parents who would let their kid send off six bucks?

Today in Halloween: Comics as treats

marvel-halloween bagged 1987 comics

This never happened to me, although it would have been fine if it had.

In 1987 – which post-dated my trick-or-treating prime by a couple of decades, or at least a decade and a half – Marvel pitched bagged mini-comics as “the safe Halloween treat.”

This wasn’t at a particular  high point for stories about apples with razor blades or poisoned candy, but here’s an in-store sales pitch for the practice.

Did you ever get bagged comic books – or “mini comics,” whatever those were – when you were trick-or-treating?