MANY YEARS AGO, when I earned my living in the publishing industry, there was a line of thought that you didn't mess with a magazine's logo - except for once a year when you were allowed, if you were lucky, to add snow. British comics have long had a tradition of adding snow to the masthead for seasonal issues. In fact, it's something of a cliche. The Dandy is dated 1938, but is by no means the earliest example I've ever seem. The Smash is 1967, when British comics were still in their heyday. The TV Comic is from 1970, but looks much more old-fashioned than the Smash , don't you think? (Click on the images to enlarge.) From a marketing point of view, I suppose, this makes sense. A product's branding is its unique identifier in the marketplace and so should always be immediately recognisable, right? But the problem with this marketing philosophy is that it assumes the customers are stupid, and it probably shouldn't be applied to magazine logos, anyway. I ...
IT'S PROBABLY hard for younger fans to understand just how slim the pickings were for those of us who followed comic book superheroes back in the 1960s. As early as 1966, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman had licensed the rights to his Marvel characters to television. The Marvel Superheroes cartoon show was made in colour, though no one had colour televisions back in 1966. And, yes, we really did sit that close to the tv set back then. The screens were so small you couldn't see anything unless you were no more than three feet away. Pretty sure all those cathode rays fried my brain ... Even Goodman didn't realise what he had, and seemed content to let the producers of the Marvel Superheroes cartoon show do pretty much what they wanted in return for almost no money. The big return would come, reasoned Marty, when the cartoons propelled the sales of his comic books into the stratosphere, just the way the Batman tv show had done for DC's Batman and Detective Comics . But...