As America enters its Century of Humiliation, its political leadership is hard at work trying to make the country as unattractive as possible to potential tourist dollars. Consider that this may have the incredible result of creating a wave of embittered, ex-theme park employees with stolen mascot costumes, easy access to firearms, and a grudge against the administration. If trends continue, the guy who plays Tigger may soon have the opportunity and motivation to do one of the funniest things of all time.
Visitors who nevertheless brave the visa fees and harassment by border goons to visit America’s scenic landscapes, famous cities, and plentiful strip malls may experience culture shock, whether it be from the size of restaurant portions, the lack of public transit infrastructure, or the random daylight kidnappings by masked men claiming to work for the government. But it was ever thus. One comment I’ve heard expressed incredulously about America, over and over again, is “yew ‘av advertisements fer medicines on the telly?”
Buddy, we have way more than that. We have goddamn A-lister superheroes shilling allergy meds.
Published in 1999, Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 was a sort of tie-in comic to The New Batman Adventures, which was a sequel show to the Primetime Emmy-winning Batman: The Animated Series. That places it in the awkward teenage phase when superheroes had moved past selling Hostess Fruit Pies but weren’t yet on the level where they could star in three minute long short films promoting Audi.
It seems like a more naïve time, looking back. I can imagine the executives selling the Bat Family/Claritin partnership to the creative team, arguing that the Rubicon had already been crossed long ago. Batman had already pushed McDonald’s, Diet Coke, and even, in 1987, a chain of discount stores.
I can’t tell if that tagline is supposed to be a bit, like a French guy saying “they’re open non-stop ’til Christmas?” Regardless, they resurrected the ’60s Batman and Robin to convince shoppers to buy products at Zayre. Not Burt Ward and Adam West, mind you, and not the original costumes, either. But it’s wild to think that you could already do Batman as a nostalgia play in the 1980s. And for the record, Adam West did do at least one ad as Batman during the run of the ’60s show. It was for U.S. Savings Bonds.
Anyway, the comic. This guy invented a “white orchid” and Bruce and Tim Drake are standing watch at a big gala celebrating his achievement, because obviously if you do anything with plants in Gotham City then Poison Ivy is going to come after your ass. You’d think all the botanists would have gotten the message and moved to Metropolis by now. Also, I’m pretty sure white orchids exist? Whatever, I’m putting too much thought into a set-up for a drug pitch.
A couple of things. First of all, “chum?” It’s been a long time since I watched the ’90s Batman cartoon, but it’s really difficult for me to imagine Kevin Conroy talking like Adam West did while calmly explaining to Robin how the Siamese Human Knot was going to break every bone in their bodies. Second, “Tammy” is really pushing the envelope of how DTF you can be in a twelve page promotional comic about antihistamines.
Poison Ivy attacks! Tim is caught by a vine because he was too “groggy.” Interesting. But hold up, let’s talk about the credits. Christopher Priest has written stories for Conan, Deadpool, and Black Panther. Joe Staton created the character Huntress and drew for Dick Tracy, Green Lantern Corps, and Guy Gardner. Mike DeCarlo inked Batman: A Death in the Family. Rick Taylor did colors on a number of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse joints. And Paul Kupperberg has edited over 1,000 comics. Between them, the men that created Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 have accumulated four Harvey Awards, two Inkpots, and an Eisner.
Kind of makes Batman’s stilted dialogue about Tim’s OTC antihistamine-induced drowsiness hit differently, doesn’t it?
Batman and Robin fight Ivy but she electrocutes Robin because their suits are statically charged and the protective case of the flower is too? I don’t know. She gets away, is the point.
Ivy ransoms the orchid and Batman goes to get it back. But this time, he tells Tim to stay home so he doesn’t fuck everything up again with his pussy-ass allergies.
I know that this comic only exists to sell Claritin. But maybe Batman and Robin weren’t the best picks? Like you’re telling me Batman, the guy who has a flying tank, exploding boomerangs, and Bat shark repellent isn’t equipped to deal with ragweed? So if Mr. Prep Time develops hay fever one day, that’s it, the whole operation is fucking over? They could have picked anyone for this. Make it the Flash and if he sneezes he turns a half-dozen nearby pedestrians into red mist.
Thankfully for Tim, Alfred shows up to deliver some copy from the brief. Tim and Alfred go to a late-night on-demand doctor — being a billionaire’s ward has its perks — and the doctor prescribes him something.
I don’t get why we’re being all coy about this when we get to the money shot. Let the guy tell Robin that only CLARITIN gives you fast-acting relief from allergy symptoms without drowsiness, so you can get back to being tortured and brainwashed by the Joker. Like, the cover already says Claritin. Did DC draw the line at having the name come out of a character’s mouth? Or was there some kind of law preventing them from actually saying it? Well, there actually might have been. We’ll get to that later.
Meanwhile, Poison Ivy’s going to kill the guy who invented the flower she stole and take his money when Batman and Batgirl arrive. She attacks them by hurling potted plants and spraying them with pollen. It isn’t pollen that makes you horny or fall asleep or makes trees grow out of your skull or anything, though — it’s just like, really bad regular allergy-causing pollen. Nonetheless, Batman and Batgirl succumb to fits of sneezing. I wonder if it pained Christopher Priest to write Batman as such a dipshit. Grab a Bat pollen protection mask out of your utility belt, asshole! Use a Bat fan to blow it away! Hold your goddamn cape up over your face! All looks lost, until…
Robin shows up.
You might not be aware of this, but sneezing famously makes noise. So Ivy’s line here implies that this pollen is going to knock Robin out rather than merely aggravate his sinuses. But the power of Claritin has rendered him immune to seemingly all of Poison Ivy’s plantological warfare. Seems like cheating, but whatever. Turnabout is fair play, so Robin gasses Ivy right in her stupid, sexy face.
There was never a second Batman Claritin comic, which I think is a shame. They could have expanded this out into a whole allergy-based run. Have Tim scarf down a bunch of Benadryl to beat Poison Ivy again — only this time he’s taken too many and he starts having hallucinations. Batman vs Hat Man!
The existence of Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 is strange in its own right. But it gets weirder. See, there weren’t always pharmaceutical ads featuring knowingly smiling men in their 60s or sexually indistinct sad blobs being followed around by rain clouds on American television.
In fact, it wasn’t until the late 1900s that a young hotshot ad executive proposed that the main customer for drug companies wasn’t doctors, but consumers. I bet you’re picturing a Don Draper type, but her name was Liz Moench, proving that women, too, can innovate in ways which make the world worse.
The first televised direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ad aired in 1983, for a pain med called Rufen. Almost immediately, the government told the company to take it off the air — which seems weird, considering that they weren’t promoting seed oils or saying that women were people. But remember, this is when we had an FDA that wasn’t run by a worm-addled bridge troll. They told drug companies they had to spell out side effects in TV ads, which made them much less attractive as marketing tools.
But then in the mid-90s, a company called Schering-Plough got an idea. They started advertising a new medication on television without actually saying what it did. All they really said was “ask your doctor.” The name of that drug?
Yes, Claritin, the very same drug that helps the Boy Wonder fight crime. And in 1997, the FDA, frustrated by these kinds of slippery tactics and possibly “encouraged” by well-meaning multinational drug conglomerates, decided to slough off the chains of censorship. From then on, drug companies could omit all the extra information they used to have to put in their ads as long as they had a website or a phone number consumers could call to get it. They were also allowed to start making specific claims about what their drugs did.
Drug companies won. Between 1995 and 2006, their spending on DTC advertising increased more than tenfold to $5 billion. The Batman Claritin comic was an early part of the drug advertising boom in the US, which remains one of only two countries in the entire world that allows the practice. The other is New Zealand, but they haven’t produced a decent supervillain since Sauron.
On that note, Liz Moench went on to have quite a career in the pharmaceutical advertising industry. Among her accomplishments, she was partly responsible for making Voltaren (diclofenac) the most-prescribed NSAID medication in the late 1980s. Diclofenac is prescribed for both people and animals, and was widely used throughout the ’90s on livestock in India. In the early 2000s, after scientists realized that a huge vulture die-off was occurring in that country, they narrowed down the cause to diclofenac prescribed to cattle. The vultures that ate the dead cows experienced liver failure, and over 99% of all vultures in the country died as a result.
Vultures eat dead animals, and without them around, there were a lot of rotting carcasses spreading disease. The absence of vultures also allowed the feral dog population to boom, causing tens of thousands more human deaths from rabies.
Would it be uncharitable — absurd, even — to say that Moench was responsible on some level for the Indian vulture crisis? Perhaps. But I think you lose the benefit of the doubt when you go to work for the industry that created the opioid crisis. On the flip side, she is indirectly responsible for a kind of funny comic where Batman gets mad at Robin for having allergies. In conclusion, the Batman Claritin comic can’t exist in the same universe as 40,000,000 alive Indian vultures.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Doug Redmond, who makes a killer cocktail with like seventeen claritin and two bottles of vodka. Ok it’s less a cocktail and more a cry for help, but Doug nails it.