Not a comic book; Seventeen magazine. Around 1980. They also had teeny ads in the back, and my eye was caught by the one for The Secret Snack. Soon all the cool people would be eating this! So I sent off for it, and went through all the Calvin’s propeller beanie agonized waiting. Finally it showed up.
Baby food. Two jars of baby food. I could barely look at it, forget eating it. The company must have had a surplus, and this was their shady way of unloading it.
Did anyone ever order the giant set of fishing equipment? I started fishing at an early age, and bought my first rod and reel when I was 4 or 5. My bullshit detector went off, and my older brothers and I figured the rods and reels must be really small.
Heh. They used to sell those balloons with a clown on them for a quarter out of a vending machine in the local laundromat.
The mail-order bride I purchased turned out to be a balloon. My wife is full of hot air.
I signed up for selling seeds but didn’t do particularly well. I also didn’t pay for them and ignored all of the letters afterwards, which eventually stopped.
Good training for when you saw your first ad for Columbia House as a teen. Who says comics aren’t educational?
Come to think about it, I did the same with them. Damn.
Now that this has gone over post #100, can we add cereal boxtop promotions?
Somewhere I still have a “Honeycomb cereal” ring with a REAL gold, er, sequin under a glass display bubble. Must be all of a thousandth of a gram of gold. It’s probably stored away in my Captain Crunch treasure chest.
How about Kool-Aid envelopes? I got a really nice camera by drinking 4800 gallons of the stuff.
And didn’t some guy claim to have won a fighter jet by collecting bottlecaps?
I recall some sort of board game with tiny, tiny tanks. Each tank had a front and a back half. Underneath they were held together by a small rubber band. When one of the players shot at the enemy tank, he would tap the back of the vehicle, hoping the rubber band would force the thing to snap in half.
I also remember the playing board was printing on smooth, cheap-feeling plastic cloth.
I never ordered anything of the kind again.
Yes, my two younger brothers and I went in on it. It came with three IIRC decent sized rods. Somehow, I ended up with the non-casting one (not sure how that worked, I was the big brother, damn it!). We weren’t actually much of a fishing family, but I do remember catching some fish with them.
My family ordered the sea monkeys or whatever those things were called. Brine Shrimp, I think?
Anyway, they came and we put them in water and they swam around a bit.
I believe our ad was in the funny section of the newspaper, though, not a comic book.
OK, here’s a summary of all the mail-order stuff I ever got in approximate chronological order (yes, I mentioned two before).
My mom got me a subscription to Dr. Seuss books when I was in kindergarten. Awesome!
Batman rubber stamp set from the back of a cereal box: They were tiny, about postage stamp size. The ink pad in the plastic case was dry, so my dad had to re-ink it.
Sea Monkeys: They lived a while. The Johnson-Smith catalog that came with them was fun to read!
Camera: A Bazooka comic premium. Never used it.
1/2 acre Ranchette in New Mexico. $6/month for I forget how long. I still own it. I probably have paid less than $3k on it over the last 47 years, so that’s about $63/year. Why? No clue. The ad was in the Sunday paper.
Brass Olympic medal pendant: $1 and a Wrigley wrapper. Bicycling.
Columbia House and BMG- once each back in the late 80s.
I have also sent in for several rebates, mostly for motor oil and other car stuff. I don’t see any of those around anymore.
This is interesting. You say you own it? What’s with the continued payments then-- did you pay for it on an installment plan, and now you’re just paying taxes on the land? Have you ever visited your Ranchette (and maybe found shifty high school chemistry teachers squatting on your land, making meth in an RV)? is it in a developed area, or the middle of nowhere?
When I was a kid, I desperately wanted those animal fact cards. You’d get like 100 up front then 20 a month in the mail for whatever price. My Ranger Rick subscription was fine but there could have been so much more I’d have known about ibex and marmots.
I feel like I was ripped off when I ordered Sea Monkeys from my Archie comic book. They sent me 3 baboons wearing snorkels.
I do recall my buddy ordering a comic book Polaris submarine, like this:
It was a shoddily made piece of junk. And you had to provide your own plutonium! 
I sincerely hope you didn’t get mixed up with Libyan terrorists. That never ends well.
Since the early 80s, I have only paid property taxes on it every year. They’re up to about $15/year now. It’s near Deming. Google maps shows the area is still mostly unoccupied. There are roads throughout the area. I guess they changed the well laws in the county a while back and now 1/2 acre lots can’t have their own well, so if anyone builds on one they’ll have to have water hauled in. No, I have never been there.
I keep hoping some amazing offer will someday arrive, asking to pay me more than I have in it. Probably won’t happen.
Long before the '70s we got an album for storing bubble gum cards from Bazooka Joe comics. My brother and I used it to store our complete set of Invaders from Mars cards - the ones that inspired the Tim Burton movie. Thrown out by our mother alas. But I did get a book about them with pictures of all the cards not that long ago.