Calvin and Hobbes 1985 Syndicate Promotional Packet

  

As D.D. Degg writes over at the Daily Cartoonist:

"Back before Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson became the mega comic strip hit it was to become the first appearance was seen in the Universal Press Syndicate press kit sent to newspaper editors. Connor Ratliff presents the entire Calvin and Hobbes press kit from the mid-1980s on his Bluesky page." 

Here are a few of those pages from the Universal Press pitch way back in 1985.

 

 

When Bill Watterson Wrote Me a Letter

 

Six months into Bill Watterson's comic strip launch, I wrote him a letter. I asked probably what many people were asking: How do I do what you do? What's the path? And then I suggested we meet. (I had learned he lived nearby. How I got THAT information I don't know.) Anyway, it was 1986 and I was a kid and Calvin and Hobbes was the best new strip out there. I had no idea if he would write back, but in June 1986, he did. Declining my lunch offer, he then went into what he felt the key was in developing a good comic strip: character development. "Just practice, and have a lot of patience, " he wrote. 

I am very fortunate to have become a professional cartoonist. By the next decade, I had done some professional cartooning including a magazine cover and a book. By the 2000s, I was off and running, with lots of clients and I was on the board of the National Cartoonists Society, as well as teaching and lecturing. A big change. Mr. Watterson was right. Patience and persistence were key.

This letter is currently up for auction at ComicLink.

Creative Playthings Reading Lotto: House (1968)

 

 From 1968, here are all of the graphic cards from Creative Playthings' Reading Lotto.

"A game that helps the pre-school child to name familiar objects and the early-reading child to associate the picture with the written word."

This is copyright 1968 by Creative Playthings in Princeton, NJ.

The drawings are all full color, bold, stylized pictures of what would be, over fifty years ago, the everyday objects found in the home. This is part of a series of Reading Lottos which include:

Things That Go

Zoo

House

Farm

City

As the child "learns to name each object, he will develop an interest in the printed label which accompanies it." 

I believe we had a set of these when I was a kid, but it was the Zoo version. There is no credit for who drew and/or designed the Reading Lotto, which was the norm. Enjoy the graphics. I sure did.

 

- Edited from an original blog entry of August 28, 2023.

Carl Rose Illustrations from TRY AND STOP ME by Bennett Cerf

Here's a rather dog-eared edition of TRY AND STOP ME, a collection of Bennett Cerf's newspaper columns. It's copyright 1944 by Mr. Cerf. The dust jacket tells us the book has

"the most amusing anecdotes of the theatre, the book world, movies and sports and the most interesting ghost stories. One chapter contains thirty-two anecdotes, in which various pigeons, herrings and mere people furnish the deliciously crazy brand of humor known as Shaggy-Dog. Some of the stories are more than a page long. Some are only a few lines, There are hundreds of them, all flavors."

Bennett was a force, and this was arguably his best-selling book. The go-to guy to illustrate this book was cartoonist Carl Rose.

Carl Rose was the cartoonist who drew the 1928 New Yorker magazine cartoon in which the mother tells the child at the dinner table, "It's broccoli, dear." And the kid responds with "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." Mr. Rose drew this, Mr. E.B. White supplied the gag line.

Rose was a busy cartoonist, and here's a small sample of a few of the dozens of drawings he did for TRY AND STOP ME. I like his line. It's bold and inky. I'm guessing a crow quill or bowl dip pen. Regardless, it's pretty pliant and Rose is a master. 

The Marx Brothers:

Tennessee Williams:

Kaufman and Hart:

Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes:

George M. Cohan:

W.C. Fields:

Harold Ross:

Heywood Braun:

Alexander Woolcott:

- This originally appeared on January 5, 2015.