Progressive Ad Campaigns

I hated drawing this mutated frogs. Google “mutated frogs” if you want to see something stomach turning— far more effective body horror than anything comic or piece of art I’ve ever seen.

For the first joke, I really wanted to show the model in question nude, uncensored, pussy fully out. I really think it would have landed better. Why? Well if you’re familiar with those old American Apparel ads I’m referencing, you’ll know that the craziest part of them wasn’t how overly sexualized they were— there are tons of super oversexed ads, for stuff like blue jeans, cologne, whatever— but how gratuitous they were. Like, an ad for half-price tank-tops will have a girl practically doing fucking goatse at the camera— all while looking totally blank and unaffected the whole time. The ads all carried this sense of banality towards their own gratuitousness, and I wanted to capture that— by having the girl stand completely straight, not doing some sexy pose, with the impact of BAM! Full frontal nudity in a beany tuesday comic. With that one sock hanging there too, as if to say “Oh yeah, we were advertising something, weren’t we?” I thought about having her just do some really gratuitous pose instead, like bent over ass to the camera— but then it might obscure the fact that she was supposed to be kind of chubby, which is the “remedy” in question. (Does that come across? People might think it’s the black bars. Ah well…) Ultimately, the joke wasn’t worth risking people getting squeamish about nudity and abandoning ship. Sorry, my integrity.

I also wanted to include another bit referencing those insane old high-fructose corn syrup propaganda ads the corn lobby put out— doing a “love yourself at any size! With High Fructose Corn Syrup” type bit, and also including someone injecting insulin, and then like a guy in a hospital bed or something, but it was too similar to the Monsanto one, which I think is funnier, and I feel like people would misinterpret it as “fat phobic” or something, which— speaking as a former fat kid who ballooned in size during middle school thanks to extremely lax public regulations on junk food, and is still dealing with self-image issues as a result of the lasting effects— is a huge crock of shit, of course, but whatever, you know how people online are.

There was also an idea about companies pledging to not use photoshop on their mascots anymore and… I dunno. Twinkie The Kid turns out to be an old dude or something? Like a human old dude? Whatever.