JF Ptak Science Books

I must say that when I first saw this advertisement for Mercedes (1924?, in the Illustrirte Zeitung from Leipzig) that I couldn’t really remember seeing someone looking quite this crazy/dedicated while trying to sell something, to anyone. This is particularly so when you take a look at a similar design for Continental Tyres, except that this ad appeared 14 years or so earlier, in 1910 (and in The Illustrated London News for May 14):   

Then I wondered about insane/laser eyes in general, and couldn’t come up much there, either.  Barney Google certainly had “goo goo googly eyes” but they weren’t necessarily crazy/insane.

Superman on the other hand did have laser eyes, and sometimes he was (made to be) crazy–still not quite up to the Mercedes guy, and he wasn’t trying to sell anything but himself and the comic that he was in.   I think that the Mercedes Man might be in his own category, and I’m not so sure how successful this ad campaign could’ve been, especially in the Weimar/Schacht era in hyper-inflated Germany.