JF Ptak Science Books Post 1062

I’ve posted a few found comix elsewhere on this blog (for example, this magnificent Italian contribution on surviving fire bombs, here), and I guess that I should have been paying more attention to these other bits of comix-driven advertisement marginalia that flits in and out of the pages of mass market weekly journals–they turn out to be pretty interesting and revealing entities.   In today’s case it is LIFE magazine for 9 June 1947, and if subtle, rueful self-awareness images like this were an automobile, this submission would be a jaguar.  It is the blatant story of a private and personal life ruined by whispers of BO, where a woman named Jane is paralyzed by the sly look and not-so-silent pronouncement of sniffy displeasure by a man named Dick.  The woman would scrub up and then somehow land that self-same Dick in the end with her newly perfumed Lifebuoy body, but only after filling bathtubs with her BO-laden tears.  But what a terrible story to tell about such a fragile existence extinguished, all to sell a bar of soap through a comic book tale on the edges of the back pages of a picture magazine.