For decade after decade, the Hostess company had their spongy, cakey fists wrapped tightly around the last few pages of both Marvel and DC comics. While the rest of the comics’ ad space was dedicated to fuzzy implorations to buy live seahorses or begin an exciting career customizing vans, or hey, selling Grit magazine for fun and profit, Hostess had a full color, full page ad in almost every comic one would read.
In what was one of the most clever product placement arrangements known to man, parodied and appreciated to this day, Hostess commissioned single-page comics in which popular comic book characters would employ Hostess snacks in crimefighting. It’s not as if these panels were the results of some wild half-assery, either. While the villain in each strip was usually a throw-away character created specifically to be thwomped on for a few panels and ultimately trumped by their love of Hostess Twinkies, these pages were well drawn and often cleverly written paeans to the sheer wonderment and omnipotence of the fruit pie. Anyone who’s bitten into a Hostess cupcake knows that these probably weren’t far from the truth. The secret ingredient… is God.
Sure, the heavily armed Robot Snake Army just threw down their laser guns because Iron Man offered them a cupcake in trade. Sure, I’ll let you take my grandmother’s spleen – I’m busy eatin’ this fruit pie! But of course you can have an unholy tryst with my wife, and thank you for the Ho Hos. Imagine the governmental progress that could be had if only someone were to tempt our politicos with cream filled delights! We’re not far from the days of the Twinkicrats and the Suzy-Q-publicans!
Of course they’re ridiculously far-fetched, but they’re also being lost as older comic books are losing footing to trade editions and decaying paper stock. Thankfully, a few archives of these amazing one-shot adventures exist digitally. In this Hostess-centric world, (one in which the sun does not exist, instead replaced by a swirling chocolate mass and life is not perpetuated by light and water, but deliciousness and a flaky crust), one can replace the chosen Hostess product in any ad with the word ‘crack’ to perhaps ascertain a comparable substance native to our heliocentric universe. Try it – it’s like a sad, sad Mad Libs. Alternately, replace said Hostess product name with naughty words for certain unmentionable body parts and have twice as much fun. You’ll never see the Mighty Thor the same way again.
Enjoy a few choice Hostess ads from my Inhumans and Machine Man comics, circa 1975-1980!
Marvel was not oblivious to this painful degree of shilling, and they took it in stride. In fact, Marvel Team-Up #134 featured the first appearance of ‘Golden Oldie’, a transformed version of Peter Parker’s Aunt May with amazing galactic superpowers, sent around the universe to collect Twinkies for Galactus, which were apparently a fair substitute for devouring the life energies of entire planets. Because Twinkies are, holiest of holies, that amazing. Of course, by the end of it all, we saw that it was a dream sequence of a guest editor spot or some other cop-out ending, but for those brief moments, Aunt May knew something other than arthritis and mourning for poor Ben. Let her dream. Let her dream.
