0198: Aviation Adventures and Model Building #17 (1947)
The Overstreet Guide refers to this one as "Half comics and half pictures", but that isn't strictly accurate. It's less than half comics, and the rest is mostly a mixture of advertising and model-building instructions. The instructions are really detailed. I'm pretty sure that I could use these to build a really interesting balsa wood airplane if I took this down to my local craft store.
Aviation Adventures and Model Building feels a lot more like a magazine with comics than it does a "traditional" comic book. Perhaps it is because the first page isn't a splash page or a story, but an ad. Not just any ad, an ad for Xacto knives. It seems weird to me that there was once a time when Xacto was a company that advertised, but there you have it.
The issue is filled with a series of very short comics stories, the most interesting of which is an ongoing series (this issue has the sixth chapter) that literally teaches how to fly: how to use the controls, and so on. I'm not sure who the audience for that would be, and it terrifies me to think that at one time you could learn to fly from what is essentially a children's comic. Unfortunately, you never would've learned to land, since the magazine was cancelled with this issue.
The most interesting ad is surely this one, for Pepsi Cola. If you know anything about American soft drink wars, you may know the name Walter Mack, the president of Pepsi who targeted black Americans directly in the 1940s. This ad, featuring Pepsi the Pepsi-Cola Cop, is not an example of that trend, but it may be an example of Pepsi's increasing reliance on niche-marketing during this decade. Definitely something to look into.
