Choose Your Own Introduction #01

Introduction 01:

When i was a child, my parents decided to put the family on a diet. We were in the first batch of adopters of the zero-carb diet - the horrors of no bread or pizza! (They tried a meatloaf crusted 'meatza', but it wasn't the same)

At any rate, during that time they switched over to Shasta diet sodas - a nasty little chemical concoction in a can. By the time we lived through that phase, something had changed. I thought that those nasty little sodas had destroyed my taste buds, but actually the soda manufacturers had dropped sugar for high fructose corn syrup during the interim. It wasn't until decades later drinking 'Real' Pepsi in Mexico that i figured out what had happened.

That formula change made Coca Cola undrinkable for me, giving it a cigarette ash aftertaste mixed with the chemical bite. We were living in the state of Georgia at the time - Coke Was It. Pepsi existed, but one had to forage independently for it. Eateries served Coke.

Not too many years later, we moved cross country to California. Not only was Pepsi aplenty, but there was a Royal Crown bottling plant in our new home town! To my taste buds, Pepsi and RC were fairly equivalent and both superior to all competitors i had sampled.

Now i had two favorite sodas with my preference leaning back and forth between them. RC was the outsider, so closer to my heart - but Pepsi had that nice tooled leather holster for my can.

How is one supposed to decide between the two?

Well, i know what the stars say...

...but with whom are they agreeing?

***

Introduction 02:

There is an odd category tucked into Un-Comics.

As regular readers know, Un-Comics is what we call comics that appear outside of comics, usually in magazines or books. Sometimes in boxes of breakfast pastries or cereal or packaged with a toy. Et cetera.

Today we're looking at Un-Comics that appeared in comic books. A contradiction? Well, yeah, but... there is a reasonable rationale here.
They're comics, but they were advertisements and so, in a sense, not part of the 'comic' itself. Some of them featured regular characters with ongoing adventures that lasted for years. There was a trend toward using comics to advertise in comics, and many followed the fad.

Let's look at the Adventures of "R.C." and Quickie for an example. I've spent the last couple days digging through comics during the time period these adverts ran - from 1944 to 1951 - and i've found most, if not all, of them. Two dozen one page ADventures -

 They must have really liked that one...

Now i suppose i'm going to have to start collecting "Pepsi" the Pepsi-Cola Cop, Volto, Tootsie, "U.S." Royal, Thom McAn, and some of those other ADventures...

ads from various issues of Sensation Comics, Flash Comics, Action, Adventure, Captain Midnight, Boy Commandos, Mary Marvel, Funny Stuff, Real Fact Comics, Hopalong Cassidy, Ozzie and Babs, Strange Adventures and Fawcett's Funny Animals (but they were lots of other places, too) (1944-1951)