The witchiest week of the year is just a weekend away ...

Color illustrations from a comic book about dental care featuring a witch and small children.

The witchiest week of the year is just a weekend away! We’re getting started a little early with some terrifying tales for teeth, courtesy of the Whitehall Pharmacal Company.

These panels were excerpted from Kolynos Presents the Crusader and the Wicked Witch, a 1951 advertisement for Kolynos toothpaste in comic book form. The comic tells the story of how Mr. Debtrifice helps two little children to protect their teeth against the Wicked Witch of Disease and Decay.

This comic is Pam 2018.0603 in Hagley Library’s pamphlets collection. It has been digitized along with other similar material to form a digital collection of promotional comic books in our Digital Archive.

The items in this digital collection offer a selection of the promotional comic books held by the Hagley Library. These works were generally, though not always, produced by corporations and other business entities for the purposes of advertising a product, managing a company's public image, or providing consumer education.

A number of these works were also produced with the goal of influencing public opinion regarding socioeconomic political issues such as organized labor and government regulation of businesses. This digital collection does not include all the Hagley's holdings of promotional comic books. New items may be added periodically.

Click here to view this digital collection now.