Remember, we aren't superheroes

This image, and the one from yesterday, are screen prints done by Rebecca, a fellow Rex fanatic from Omaha. Johnny's ads for Rex, which appeared in the weekly paper when she was a kid, were her first experience with the absurd. She told me how grown up it made her feel when she first realized that there was actually no hidden meaning in them. They were just what they were.

She collected the ads as a kid, but burnt the whole connection in her early twenties, shortly after meeting the guy who would become her husband. She was young enough to think he was going to fill up every corner of her life, so wanted to make room.

In the last few years she has begun to try and recreate them from memory. Her memory seems to be pretty good. I actually found some original text from Johnny's notebook that is only a slight variation on the text of today's ad. And, given Johnny's tendency to edit at the typesetting machine (strangely, especially the text of those where he had referred to himself in the third person), her memory may even be closer to the published version that the notebook.

In the industry, Rex Cola has always been considered the desert cola. Its popularity tracing a route from the high plateaus of New Mexico and Arizona where John Steam would winter, through Nevada, Oregon and Idaho and reaching its northernmost range in the Battlefords region of Central Saskatchewan.

It was the one of the first virtual industries really. There were individual manufacturers in each small town or city. John would provide them with recipes, instruction manuals for creating a bottling facility out of old car parts, all such basic requirements. And then on his yearly tours he would just pass on marketing advice, give them whatever new ad captions and concepts he'd had on the drive over from the last town.

Johnny Steam never seemed to stop long enough to focus