vintage witching hour ad of the day

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Vintage Ad #392: Trick Card Decks
Source: The Witching Hour #46, September 1974

Pick a card, any card...

The "Wizard Collusion Trick" sounds intriguing, though I wonder if it is merely the secret of how to get other budding Blackstones to purchase six decks of trick cards. For me, the term "collusion" usually conjures images of baseball owners agreeing not to sign free agents.

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As for the floating head with the giant bowtie, Marshall Brodien was a Chicago-based magician whose fame came from promoting these cards on television and a long stint as Wizzo the Wizard on WGN's edition of Bozo the Clown.


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The Witching Hour was the third title introduced during DC's late 1960s resurrection of horror/suspense anthologies, following House of Mystery and The Unexpected. Debuting on newsstands in late 1968, witches Cynthia (the alluring one), Mildred (the fat one) and Mordred (the crone) presented spooky stories for 85 issues until they rode their brooms into The Unexpected in the wake of the DC Implosion of 1978. Neil Gaiman later adapted these characters into his Sandman mythos as The Three. I admit I hacked this ad out of a disintegrating copy of the source issue that I cut up for Christmas cards and tossed out eons ago, so no details on the yelp yarns within other than Nick Cardy's cover was more impressive than what lay inside.

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