An analysis of poppers advertising reveals much about the people who use and produce poppers. In fact, it has become a cult, and anyone who has seen a cross-section of print poppers advertising can be left in no doubt that it is a male gay phenomenum. The connection with the military is also strong, as the advertising was at one time aiming at young gay men returning from fighting in Vietnam. In the words of Ian Young, 

"it's striking how many of them feature bombs, bullets, weaponry, and other symbols of death and destruction. The most sinister of all is a full-page colour spread for a brand called Hardware. It shows an open bottle of the product, surrounded by and seemingly giving rise to the distinctive, death-seeding mushroom cloud of an atomic (or hydrogen) bomb. In the head of this reddish-gold phallic cloud are two human faces, their eyes closed, their noses appearing to melt or dissolve. Between the faces is another, subliminal image: the head of a snorting white bull. The text below reads: "Intensely Powerful." "

Poppers advertising was big in the seventies and early eighties before the poppers AIDS connection came along to spoil the party and certain gay activists began to ask poppers manufacturers not to advertise poppers in gay publications. Not long later, the sale of poppers was banned in the United States and consequently print advertising came to an end. Therefore, the most recent poppers advertising goes back twenty years and is considered by many - in particular by nostalgic middle-aged gay men - to be nothing less than gay cultural classics. This attitude is particularly reflected in the nostalgic presentation of poppers advertising as classics in the dominantly gay allaboutpoppers.com.

Not only did the commercialisation of poppers produce a wealth of advertising but also cartoons and cartoon characters. Jerry Mills was the most famous of the poppers cartoonists and he died of AIDS, which did the poppers cause no good at all. PWD, the producers of RUSH, had their very own superhero called Captain RUSH. (For those interested, an anthology of Jerry Mills cartoons are available at Amazon.)

But the arrival of AIDS and the ultimate banning of poppers advertising meant the death of print poppers advertising and poppers advertising in general until the arrival of the Internet. In the past ten years, exclusively thanks to the Internet, poppers advertising is once more reaching the poppers market and poppers is once again becoming big business. 

Poppers websites are the new poppers advertising, reaching far more people than print advertising could ever hope to do, and it is ironic that a website such as allaboutpoppers.com, which is itself the most successful poppers advertisement in the world today, should run a section on poppers advertising itself. PWD have resurrected their superhero, Captain Rush, who now has his very own website: captainrush.com. Two new Captain Rush comics are currently available.

Poppers advertising is alive and well - albeit in a very different form than the poppers advertising pioneers every dreamt of - despite fifteen years of being illegal in the United States.