The Insult That Made a Man Out of "Mac"

Brand

Charles Atlas

Copywriter

Charles Roman

Year

1940

Country

USA

A comic-strip ad for the Charles Atlas Dynamic-Tension body-building course in which a skinny man is humiliated by a bully on the beach, sends for the course and returns to beat him. Chief Marketer credits Charles Roman, Atlas's partner from 1928 who ran the company, with writing it in 1940. Versions ran in pulp magazines and comic books into the 1970s, reportedly in tens of thousands of insertions.