Ads in comics are nothing new. Ever since kids everywhere were enticed to send a couple bucks to an address for a pair of x-ray specs there have been ads within the funny books. Today the ads are a little (but not a lot) different. Most of the ones I see are for licensed merchandise bearing super-hero images or video games. That's leading at least one person to say there's tremendous untapped potential for advertisers within comics. With characters from Marvel and DC becoming more ingrained into the pop culture through big-screen movies the books those characters are drawn from are becoming bigger and bigger business.

The audience that reads them, specifically, is often one that has a good amount of disposable income, is a young adult and is tech savvy. That's a demographic that is often in marketers' cross-hairs. While I share some of the wariness of JK at Newsarama about more ads intruding on my comic reading, from an advertising perspective this makes sense. Seems there's a lot of potential money being left on the table by not advertising more in comics.