Were There Actually Batman and Robin Cigarette Ads?

CBR

Comic Legends: Were There Actually Batman and Robin Cigarette Ads?

By Brian Cronin

Published Jun 23, 2018

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, did Batman and Robin really advertise cigarettes in the Golden Age?

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and eighty-fifth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

As always, there will be three different posts for each legend this week!

NOTE: The CSBG Twitter page hit 10,050 followers, so I did a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed earlier this week. We'll keep the bit going, though. Every 1,000 followers of the CSBG Twitter page, I'll do a bonus Comic Book Legends Revealed that week.

COMIC LEGEND:

Winston cigarettes had ads featuring Batman and Robin.

STATUS:

False

Often, we get a very skewed idea of what the past was like when it came to certain customs. On the one hand, there are words and ideas that would be considered highly offensive now that would be seen as commonplace words and ideas back in the day.

However, on the flip side of that concept, there are also often things that the present is convinced were common back in the day that were not. For instance, when racist caricatures are used, people will sometimes say, "Yeah, but it was the past. That was okay back then." That's not the case, plenty of people knew that these things were deemed offensive at the time. It just wasn't public enough for the mainstream to care enough to get people to stop. Notably, Fawcett Comics stopped all of their racist caricatures in, like, 1944!

Similarly, there has been so much written about how American popular culture used to depict the use of cigarettes that people get the wrong idea and think that no one realized that there might be something dangerous about cigarettes. That is not the case. For years, there had been an avoidance of having cigarette ads in the big comic book companies like National Comics (now DC Comics) and Batman never did an ad for cigarettes.

Therefore, for the seven or so people who wrote me about this ad, it is a fake...