A Co mpe nd iu m of Ca rt o o n Adv e rt ising

F or the first time ever, a history and compen-

dium of Cartoon Advertising, from its origins
in the 19th century through its Golden Age up to
World War II.

Cartoonists, illustrators, comic strips, cartoon

characters… plus the hard-sell and soft-appeal
of ads, commercials, pitches, slogans, and sales
campaigns!

A comprehensive survey of an American institu-

tion, overflowing with more than 200 full-color

FANTAGRAPH I C s B OO KS
illustrations, including:

Many rare ads, posters, and products!

Outstanding artwork and outrageous

advertising claims!

American consumers’ beloved ads and

cartoon-spokesmen, and corporate
America’s most seductive campaigns
of persuasion!

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© 2011 Fantagraphics Books and Marschall Books.
All text is copyright © 2011 Rick Marschall except the
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Captions © Rick Marschall and Warren Bernard.
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This volume will be followed, appropriately, by Volume II. This book cov-
ers the approximate period between 1870 and 1940 – the advent of cartoon
advertising until the beginning of World War II. The next collection will
also span approximately 70 years, through the war and readjustment; the
’50s and ’60s, with their distinctive aspects; superheroes, animation and
TV characters; the undergrounds and alternative cartoonists; to the prod-
ucts and media of today.
Drawing Power: A Compendium of Cartoon Advertising is just that: a
concise, comprehensive collection, but a survey. Readers may note the ab-
sence of some favorite product (or, rather, ad campaign for that product);
nostalgia can be a motivating factor, not that there’s anything wrong with
that. But the editors aimed for inclusion of significant as well as memora-
ble images. In truth there were regrets, not just that this-or-that ad didn’t
make the cut; but that we could not fit in more examples of certain ads
and cartoonists. In a perfect world, a larger book would contain as many
cartoon ads as Carter had liver pills. Many more.
The desire for more (which in itself would prove the contention that
cartoon ads increase the reader’s appetite for any and all things) can
be mollified by ancillary products, and electronic collections of overflow
images, offered at the end of the book.
 1870s 1940s

Fa n t a g r a p h i c s B o o k s , S E AT T L E

Ma r s c h a l l B o o k s
4
 Cartoons and the Selling of America
by Rick Marschall
J
ean Shepherd, the diarist of American popular
culture – the Samuel Pepys of our time – chronicled
the theme of this book in almost everything he wrote
or delivered in monologues. On radio and in print he told
the story of his childhood that he later definitively depicted
in the classic film A Christmas Story:
Ralphie, a fan of radio’s Little Orphan Annie, had sent
away for the Ovaltine-sponsored secret decoder to deci-
pher messages given during the radio program. Intermi-
nable weeks passed until the shiny metal disk arrived in
the family’s mailbox. Nine-year-old Ralphie locked himself
in the bathroom, seeking privacy as he decoded the jumble
of letters he had anxiously transcribed from the broadcast.
Letter by letter the message revealed itself –
be… sure… to… drink… your… ovaltine
“Ovaltine? A crummy commercial?” Ralphie lisped. “Son
of a bitch!”
Shep captured the essence of mid-century America, a
nexus of entertainment, commercialism, technol-
ogy, imagination, and – more than merely
cartoons and radio – of art and com-
merce, American style.
Radio Orphan Annie was the
first popular children’s radio
program, built on the success
of the popular comic strip by
Harold Gray. The show ran
between 1930 and 1942,
first on Chicago’s WGN,
then NBC’s Blue Network
and the Mutual Broad-
casting Network. The
strip itself was a phenom-
enal success, appealing to
children and adults alike
with its mixture of humor and
adventure, fantasy and poli-
tics (its role as a New Deal
dissenter was as notable, and effec-
tive, as any Republican politician’s).
Annie’s active licensing and merchan-
dising included books, toys, games… and
the radio show, sponsored by Ovaltine, which in turn
spawned sales of ceramic mugs, Bakelite shaker cups, pin-
kie rings, and the aforementioned twin-dial decoder ring.
Its theme song was a popular hit in itself, and millions of
copies of the sheet music were released.
Jean Shepherd built his vignette on one of many love
children spawned by cartoons and advertising. Among my
own formative experiences was the privilege of growing up
in the New York City suburbs, and listening to Shepherd
every weeknight for years, on WOR, 10:15 to 11 p.m.; and
two hours live from the Limelight, a Greenwich Village
club, every Saturday night. Among his cultural observa-
tions, tales of Indiana childhood (also the substance of later
books and movies), and Army stories, was his fascination
with “Trivia.” As a kid already hooked on old comics and
movies, I was a receptive audience when he talked about old
comic characters’ names, obscure jingles, and memories of,
say, breakfast cereal and candy bars… not just their flavors
but their names and what the packaging looked like.
Today we know what Trivia is, from Trivial Pursuit and
parlor games. But it was Shepherd who gave the name –
indeed, the first formal recognition – to the nostalgic efflu-
via of American popular culture. In later years, when I got
to know Shep, he told me what I already knew by osmosis:
none of this obsession was derisive or dismissive. It was all
fun, almost reverential – a part of his childhood, a part of
America’s adulthood.
A Leitmotif of A Christmas Story – or, to dish up another
pretentious but appropriate term, Ralphie’s idée fixe – was
the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred Shot
Range Model Air Rifle. Ralphie was so enamored of the
toy that he could rattle off its cumbersome name faster
than firing two shots at Black Bart (except for the time he
momentarily was flustered in the presence of Santa Claus).
Amidst the childhood fantasy was reality. Shepherd-as-
Ralphie, and thousands of kids he represented, wanted
to do more than pretend defending his parents from bad
guys with any rifle. It had to be the Red Ryder air rifle.
The sidearm of the comic-strip cowboy… whose cartoon
adventures were collected in comic books and Big Little
Books... and his own radio show… which had a variety of
sponsors… who issued toys and games and apparel fea-
turing Red Ryder... until, ultimately, every boy
in America wanted to be like the comic-
strip cowboy, to own the air rifle he
saw in those ads in magazines and
the Sunday funnies. In fact, as
the cartoon ad pledged, to “be
a cowboy.” Cartoons ads were
the entry drugs to the hal-
lucinatory dream that boys
who had never seen cows,
much less horses, could
“be cowboys.”
Shepherd pioneered
nostalgia quizzes, but he
also anticipated America’s
love affair with the minor
preoccupations and random
subtexts of its recent past.
In music, the Statler Broth-
ers built a catalog of songs
lovingly devoted to movie serials,
radio programs, and comic charac-
ters (Do You Remember These?; The
Strand; What Ever Happened to Randolph
Scott?; The Class of ’57; etc). Indeed there are few
of us who cannot connect with old cartoons and com-
ics, or advertisements and commercials from our youth.
Despite, sometimes, our best efforts, they have become part
of our DNA. I see a bar of Dial Soap these days and I still
hear the slogan in my skull, “Aren’t you glad you use Dial?
Don’t you wish everybody did?” despite my frank agnosti-
cism on the issue. When I walk down the cereal aisle at the
supermarket and my eye sees a box of Maypo, my ears,
or at least one of them, hears that cartoon brat yelling,
“I want my Maypo!” from the TV cartoon commercials.
Thanks to the propaganda concocted by the Greenwich
Goebbelses and the Larchmont Lenins, when I was a
kid I could recite – before I was able to rattle off, say, the
Ten Commandments – the toothpaste pitchman’s solemn
assurance: “Crest has been shown to be an effective
decay-preventive dentifrice when used in a conscientiously
applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional
care.” Achtung!
Corporations do not spend billions of dollars on adver-
tising unless it works, and works well – programming the
patterns of consumer habits, creating appetites of their prey.
And, very often, cartoons and comics have been the bait that
has lured the prey, a.k.a. the rest of us suckers, every minute.
5
 I
f consumers are the victims,
we are, however, willing little
sheep being led to the slaugh-
ter. Never was there a happier
group of patsies in history. Know-
ing that advertising is effective,
ad agencies have lavished the
sweat and blood of talented staffs,
and the best possible writers and
illustrators and cartoonists and
designers and photographers, and
the best productions values.
The ad men’s incentives tra-
ditionally were roughly equal
parts boundless creativity, pride
in jobs well done, and stark ter-
ror that their clients will switch
to rival agencies. It is, therefore,
a funny business – “funny” be-
ing defined as the root word of
terms like “funny farm.” The
profession is only about 150 years
old in America (although some
would claim that it is the world’s
oldest profession), and the few
history books written by sur-
vivors offer portraits of stereo-
typical ad men. The executives
are depicted as nuts of bizarre
temperaments who spat on con-
ference tables and fired entire
suites of workers at will. Different
breeds were account execs and cre-
ative directors, portrayed as nuts
who careened between inspired
creativity and dark mental blocks, and who also fired
workers at will, or were themselves fired on whims. Their
ulcers had ulcers. Finally, “talent” (cartoonists, illustrators,
designers, copywriters, photographers) were assumed to be
nuts merely by virtue of their calling.
Oddly enough, it was our heroes, especially the cartoon-
ists and illustrators, who might have had the most job
security. Low folks on the totem pole, seldom credited when
their offhand suggestions saved an agency’s collective Prep-
aration H, their skills were the irreducible components to
bring any ad to completion. So the red carpets were always
out for them, up and down Madison Avenue.
Madison Avenue in Manhattan, of course, is the tradi-
tional home of the advertising business. Some big-name
agencies were, and are, located in Chicago, and for ob-
vious reasons in Los Angeles, but MadAve became the
real and symbolic home of the ad game. New York City
has its gallery ghetto (upscale upper Madison Ave); the
Garment Center; Chinatown; Little Italy; and the Lower
East Side, where they slice actual baloney. MadAve came
to represent the neighborhood, the business, the people
of the ad game. Mad Men, the hit TV series, refers to the
street, and – returning to an earlier point – the mental and
emotional conditions of its denizens. Jerry Della Femina,
perhaps the quintessential ad man of the last couple of
lifetimes, reportedly was the source of not one, but sev-
eral, characters in the show. His 1970 memoir, titled after
a presumably facetious tag-line he threw out in a brain-
storm-session for the Panasonic account – “From those
wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor” – is a book
still in print. And Della Femina is still active in advertising,
while also publishing his own newspaper and running his
own restaurant.
The self-portrait and other-portraits in his book solidi-
fied a character type in the public consciousness. The ad
man was already carving a niche in American literature.
Bruce Barton, influential ad exec, one of the Bs in Bat-
ten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne, wrote a book in 1925
called The Man Nobody Knows. Peripherally it was about
6
advertising and business meth-
ods, a biography of Jesus seen
through the lenses of modern
management theory. Or so its
detractors dismissed it. Actu-
ally it was a remarkable work of
theology, an apologetic for what
contemporary Americans could
learn from Christ when depicted
differently than the moony wimp
of Sunday School tracts. It was
an enormous best-seller in its
day and remains one of the major
successes of 20th century publish-
ing. But it was also treated as an
ad man’s prism, the way these
“types” supposedly looked at life.
Fiction and the movies were
establishing stereotypes and
clichés of the actual advertising
executive. Tono-Bungay, by H. G.
Wells, was a novel from the early
part of the century about an en-
trepreneur some called visionary
but was exposed as a shyster (the
miracle cure he hyped was a pun
based on “Ton o’ bunk, eh?”).
Contemporaneous was Upton
Sinclair’s The Jungle, more
about slaughter-houses and ba-
cilli than the advertising of same;
but the broad-brush implications
were there. In fact, as the cen-
tury sludged toward a lockstep
anti-capitalist viewpoint in the
arts, the businessman, the salesman, and the advertising
executive routinely were depicted as Bad Men, not just
Mad Men. Such was the theme of the book and movie
The Hucksters; the villain in Death of a Salesman was of
course the System; and the ad-game culture was the ter-
ra infirma of Ernie Kovacs’ brilliant and neglected novel
Zoomar, about the early days of television.
Civilians who didn’t know their Battons from their Bar-
tons were getting a picture of the ad man. And they were
usually correct. The ad man, as a character and as a symbol
of American business, was not quite the Lone Cowboy or
fearless Explorer, but he has gone into American lore.
What kept, and keeps, these putative Nobel-Prize litté-
rateurs and Great Artists on those treadmills? Surely it is
not a devotion to certain toothpaste formulas, nor even the
lure of bonuses or better offices closer to the Chairman.
The answer can be found, most viscerally, in the work
by the “other side of the coin,” the cartoonists. In every
creative endeavor there is a joy in the process, pride in goals
accomplished. Copywriters do not take particular satisfac-
tion, if their accounts are, say, cigarette brands, to read
statistics about cancer deaths. And few ad men likely are
callous to that particular dilemma. Yet, once challenged,
the existential search is for the right campaign: theme,
slogan, copy, artwork, persuasive magic. The achievement
is measured deep-down by ad men and their artists more
by “knowing it,” than by any resultant sales increases
months later.
Capturing a will-o’-the-wisp phrase or a once-in-a-life-
time serendipity can make an ad man’s career, in self-satis-
faction if not income (although many a man or woman was
set for life by “scoring” with a product or client).
“Good to the last drop!” Theodore Roosevelt supposedly
exclaimed after a breakfast’s coffee at Nashville’s Max-
well House Hotel. It was an ad man who transformed it
into an institution.
“Have you a little Fairy in your home?” was nation-
al catch-phrase for Fairy Soap, in, needless to say, a
bygone time.
 “They laughed when I sat down to play the piano…”
represents all the mail-order self-help, learn-at-home, and
nascent 12-step nostrum advertisements.
“I was a 97-pound weakling” was the slogan of
body-building kits humped by Charles Atlas (né Angelo
Siciliano), an ad campaign that single-handedly kept match-
book companies and pulp magazines solvent for years.
Cartoon characters eventually cohabited with the clever
slogans and catchlines to attract and solidify the public’s
attention. This joy of creation – and the unique symbiosis
between copywriters and cartoonists – will be clear enough
in the pages of this book.
of pianos, soaps, and vacation resorts. Surely the most out-
landish fiction of the day was not written by novelists, but
by copywriters in advertising agencies.
Testimonials and endorsements also reflected a duality.
Originally most testimonials were from celebrities, and
fairly dignified celebrities at that. Pears’ Soap was in the
forefront. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (prominent pastor
of America’s largest church; a political leader; and brother
of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
allowed his whiskerless and presumably scrubbed-clean
face to be festooned on full-page ads, as he averred that
“cleanliness is next to godliness.” Amen. Other Pears’ Soap
ads featured the singing sensation Adelina Patti, whose

T
his inchoate joy of the process is as old in America as endorsement assured readers that she cleaned her body
Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanacs and throat with no other soap.
mixed advertising, sometimes subtly, with aphorisms, Pears’ Soap also pioneered the use of cartoons in their
weather forecasts, useful business information, and bib- advertisements. In a famous cartoon ad, a filthy hobo,
lical wisdom. It truly can be said that the first American instead of a shiny celebrity, testified that he used Pears’
political cartoons, by Franklin and by Paul Revere, were Soap three months ago, “and since then has used no other.”
simply advertisements for the cause of independence. By Patent medicines and absurd advertising claims were
the Civil War era, advertising in urban newspapers (usu- dealt a body-blow (but not exterminated) when one of
ally restricted to dignified, i.e., boring, type) and nation- Theodore Roosevelt’s many reforms, the Pure Food and
al magazines (offering primitive woodcut imagery) was
common. Barely two weeks after President Lincoln’s assas-
sination, amid ads for metallic artificial legs and “pimple
banishers” in Harper’s Weekly, three display ads selling
medallions memorializing Abraham Lincoln, and two ads
selling photographs of John Wilkes Booth, appeared. The
Booth photos were offered for 25 cents each, approximately
$5 in today’s value. “Immediacy” in advertising was on the
rise, rivaled only by “tackiness.”
By the 1880s, ads ran on two main tracks, the high road
and the low road. (To some critics, advertising’s two roads
invariably are the low road and the lower road.) America’s
prosperity was in full swing; consumers had money to spend
and therefore businesses had money to spend on advertis-
ing. The advance in printing technologies, coupled with the
proliferation of magazines and newspapers to carry ads,
all gave rise to advertising’s first Golden Age. The schizo-
phrenic nature of advertising columns in periodicals of the
1880s and ’90s is startling, and frankly hilarious. Dignified
artwork accompanying ad copy for expensive pianofortes
was juxtaposed with garish display ads for trusses, bustles,
cocaine-addiction cures, and wart removers. “Electric ciga-
rettes” are advertised not by a close-up of the cigarette, but
of the dandy who would smoke them.
Electric cigarettes? In the 1880s, electricity was a new
phenomenon; Thomas Alva Edison was the boy wizard of
Menlo Park. So a firm marketed “electric cigarettes.” The
amazing product was more the work of sulfur than circuit-
ry. The tip of a match was embedded in the end of the ciga-
rette, and all the smoker had to do, besides avoiding bent
and broken cigarettes, was strike the cigarette against the
package. Eureka! A flaming-tipped cigarette. A Dr. Scott
marketed these novelties, in the days before prosaic warn-
ings about cancer and flammable moustaches.
Dr. Scott electrified the nation with many such prod-
ucts. Illustrated ads in the old magazines show off his
arsenal of galvanized wonders: electric belts and ladies’
corsets; electric toothbrushes; and electric hairbrushes.
Turgid and pseudoscientific ad copy assured potential cus-
tomers that if they doubted the products’ electric proper-
ties – whose benefits were well known, of course, to medi-
cine and science – they could conduct a test by passing
magnets near the products. Magnetic underwear alone
was insufficiently salubrious: Dr. Scott had to ballyhoo
electricity, which was still a step removed from supersti-
tion. (Thank goodness we live in a more enlightened time,
when pitchmen no longer promote invigoration through
magnets or, say, copper bracelets.)
Stewart Holbrook called it the Golden Age of Quack-
ery. Vulgar nostrums and cures, promises and testimoni-
als, were the stuff of magazine advertising, swamping in
number if not column-inches the more refined promotion

7

Drug Act of 1906, became law. Previously, a few publishers
had already begun to ban the bogus. Victor Lawson of the
Chicago Record in the late 1880s rejected advertisements
of products making obviously fraudulent claims. Popu-
lar magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and The
Ladies’ Home Journal had banned certain products and
claims from their pages as early as 1893. In 1904 Collier’s
Weekly published a series of exposés about patent medi-
cines, “The Great American Fraud,” by Samuel Hopkins
Adams, one of the Muckraking Era’s greats. The public,
further outraged by depictions of the meat-packing indus-
try in the best-selling novel The Jungle, provided fuel for
legislative fire.
At the same time, some manufacturers and advertisers
already had begun looking past the muck of nostrums and
quackery, false claims and outrageous promises. In 1896,
Ingersoll watches had annual sales of about 3000 units.
8
Their watches’ retail price was $1.50. Any customer could
afford one; the lack of diamonds in the mechanism enabled
the reasonable price tag. But there was no up-tick-tock in
sales, because shopowners were reluctant to give equal
space in their display cases with watches with more expen-
sive timepieces that yielded higher profits. Ingersoll had
time on its hands… lots of it, as the watches were not being
showcased or promoted. John Brisben Walker’s Cosmopoli-
tan Magazine induced Ingersoll to take a $250 display ad
in its pages, a beautiful drawing of a beautiful watch that
could be purchased by mail. The first ad resulted in 1800
orders. Within three years – the result of illustrated peri-
odical advertising – Ingersoll was producing 8000 watches
a day to meet the demand.
Illustrations, drawings, and mail-order coupons
remained timely assets of Ingersoll into the 1930s, when
the watch for which they became most famous – the Mickey
Mouse watch – was sold through Sunday funnies and kids’
magazines. Artwork, meet advertising.
The wildly popular reprint 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalog
(foreword by S. J. Perelman, 1968) shows how important
illustrations were to the mail-order sales of The World’s
Greatest Store. But another reprint the following year,
1929 Johnson Smith Catalog, featured hundreds of adver-
tising cartoons. Of course, there were different commercial
demands between modular houses or wedding dresses in
the Sears catalog, and rubber pools of fake vomit and seat
cushions that farted in Johnson Smith.
Just prior to the Johnson Smith heyday, President Cal-
vin Coolidge famously said, “After all, the chief business
of the American people is business.” Just so (although
the thrust of his speech, forgotten today, was that some-
thing higher than profits should motivate businessmen);
but more to the point – our point here – were the words
of Thomas J. Barratt, of Pears’ Soap, whose campaigns we
mentioned above: He said, “Any fool can make soap… it
takes a clever man to sell it.”
W
hich brings us to a Hall of Fame of early advertis-
ing luminaries. The following names are visited
because they helped shape the industry we con-
sider in this book; this will not be an exhaustive Who’s
Who of ad men through the decades. But these are people
who shepherded the business to its inexorable rendezvous
with cartooning.
The first agency that composed and placed print adver-
tising was established in Philadelphia by Volney B. Palmer
in 1841. Almost 25 years later, George P. Rowell of Boston
took the concept a step further and offered merchants a
service to sell space-ads in multiple outlets, on commis-
sion. Responding to newspapers’ reluctance to share their
circulation figures, Rowell published the first American
Newspaper Directory – a valuable resource thereafter, not
incidentally to future historians – in 1869.
Impressed by the logic of opportunity and a burgeon-
ing field of newspapers and magazines, advertising agen-
cies were established in rapid succession. Carlton & Smith
opened in 1864, and, after mergers and promotions, became
the gold-standard J. Walter Thompson Agency. N. W. Ayer
(also destined to be a publisher of directories) set up shop
in 1869 and pioneered the paradigm of ad men suggesting,
rather than responding to, innovations. The cracker baker
Henry D. Perky, for instance, was having trouble maintain-
ing his business, until Ayer suggested forsaking the musty
and wormy cracker barrels and offering Uneeda Biscuits
in wrappers and boxes. Shopowners were impressed, shop-
pers were delighted, and the National Biscuit Company
– NaBisCo – was on its way. Uneeda’s early “mascot,”
by the way, was a drawing of a little boy in a yellow rain
slicker, intended to convince readers that the soda crackers
would maintain their pleasing dry and crumbly consistency
through all kinds of weather. Offstage, he and another car-
toon ad mascot, the umbrella-toting Morton Salt Girl, were
probably having a fling.
 Breakfast foods deserve their special treatment. It was
an industry that grew from few precedents, managed by
lunatics, and – every step of the way – was dependent upon
cartoon advertising as much as pulverized grains and their
laxative effects. The 1994 biopic The Road To Wellness
scarcely opens the box. John Harvey Kellogg, obsessed with
bowel movements and other aspects of the human condi-
tion, ran an eccentric sanitarium of eccentric regimens for
eccentric health-seekers in Battle Creek, Michigan. His
abused brother Will Keith Kellogg slaved over menial jobs
at the dietary gulag, and experimented with food prepara-
tions on the side.
W. K. discovered that the mush of grain-pastes, when
rolled and baked, could be cut or shaped into “flakes.”
Kellogg’s flakes were the result, and W. K.’s bold advertis-
ing concepts frequently included cartoons or humorous,
folksy illustrations. An early premium in the boxes of
corn flakes, The Jungle Land Moving Picture Book, was
a pamphlet with sectioned pages that allowed children to
design hundreds of animals by flipping portions of pages
with cartoons on them. It was a premium that was used
for more than two decades. (One aspect of corn flakes that
W. K. did not promote was his flaky brother’s conviction
that they were anaphrodisiacs – that they deadened the
sex drive.)
In 1928 another grain was mutilated and reborn in
the form of Rice Krispies, and early on, a cartoonist was
delegated to create its identification. Like Grace Drayton
(the Campbell Soup Kids) before him, the cartoonist was
not required to draw in a new style or invent radically
different characters: their familiar characters already had
loyal followers.
Meanwhile, back at the sanitarium, in its early days
a patient named C. W. Post was so taken with the pre-
masticated experiments of breakfast fare that he attempted
to join the Kelloggs, but was put off by their assorted ec-
centricities. In the selfsame Battle Creek, Post cast about
for other grains and other functions (commercial,
not bodily), and hit upon what he deemed
to be a coffee substitute: Postum. Made
from wheat bran, wheat, molasses,
and corn derivatives, when mixed
with water it was a sludge that
resembled coffee but was free
of its “evil” caffeine. Mil-
lions of early risers were
sufficiently impressed
by its qualities – or too
sleepy to object – and
Postum became a compo-
nent of many household
and military breakfasts
for decades.
Postum’s biggest years
were when an inspired ad
campaign – perhaps the
greatest of all cartoon ad-
vertising – made a star of its
comic-strip villain, Mr. Coffee
Nerves. Strips in Sunday funny
sections were drawn by Milton Caniff
and Noel Sickles, and several other top-
flight cartoonists. (Caniff later confided to me
that, since the gorgeous Coffee Nerves ads were drawn as
late-night freelance work, he invariably had a mug of cof-
fee next to his ink bottle, ready as needed. Never Postum.
He said he would rather have drunk the ink.)
Post later began producing what came to be called Post
Toasties. He beat the Kelloggs at their own game, outselling
many of their products, for years. He was just one of dozens
of breakfast-cereal manufacturers whose headquarters, in-
explicably, were in Battle Creek, not exactly in the Wheat
Belt of America. Yet the landscape was dotted with factories
belching forth slightly varied forms of crisped gruel.
Another fancier of grain mush was the aforementioned
Henry D. Perky, he of the Uneeda Biscuit empire. An
eponymous entrepreneur, he discovered that wheat mush
could be rolled and extruded (like angel-hair pasta), spun
into nests, baked, and marketed as Shredded Wheat. For
no reasons other than catching shoppers’ eyes, Nabisco
had a cartoonist paint Niagara Falls on the box design,
an example of irrelevance giving birth to product loyalty.
I always wondered whether the Falls were a sublimi-
nal assurance of flushing toilets, but I have no market
research as substantiation.
A cereal groupie named Edward Ellsworth, after the turn
of the century, marketed his version of the flakes as “Force
Cereal.” The name was redolent of not much – perhaps the
strength that could be gained by controlling oneself during
the day after ingesting such a breakfast. In any event, Ells-
worth’s cereal is yet another example of cartoons’ role in a
product’s success. A pair of young ladies invented a grouchy
cartoon character whose outlook and disposition
completely changed after eating Force. They
submitted cartoons and poems about
this gastronomically bipolar fel-
low, whose post-Force name was
Sunny Jim. Force Cereal lasted
for decades, on store shelves,
that is, and still sells in Eng-
land. Sunny Jim and Force
were as popular on the
American landscape as
many commercial comic-
strip characters. (It is
possible that the ad cam-
paign inspired a send-up,
the long-running Sunday
page Slim Jim and the
Force, which commenced
half a dozen years after the
cereal serial. Slim Jim was
a mischievous circus clown,
chased for a never-stated reason
by three bungling cops, the Force.)
Meanwhile, back at Kellogg’s,
struggling to lead the industry it created,
W. K. was a man already wise to the charms
of ad copy and artwork. His bag of promotional tricks in-
cluded hiring top cartoonists and illustrators for lavish
magazine back-covers; huge urban billboards; and the
pretentious slogan that warned, “Beware of Imitations.
None Genuine Without This Signature, W.K. Kellogg.”
But one day, on a train, he met a rumpled advertising ex-
ecutive named Leo Burnett. The rest was history, both for
Kellogg’s (for whom Burnett would be Gr-reat!) and for
cartoonists as ad men. Burnett was the first and maybe
the greatest proponent of cartoons as sales magnets, and
cartoon characters as pitchmen.
9
 Our hero – whose Leo Burnett Agency is still in busi-
ness, a top Chicago institution – invented the friends of
our childhoods and every housewife: Tony the Tiger;
Snap, Crackle, and Pop; the Jolly Green Giant; Charlie the
Tuna; the Pillsbury Dough Boy; and other cartoon huck-
sters. A bonus of adopting cartoon spokesmen: what pen-
and-ink character had to be paid royalties, like actors or
base-ball stars?
W
ith no offense intended to subsequent trailblazers,
Burnett’s story brings us to a transformational
point in advertising history, and so we turn more
attention to the cartoonists whose work and whose charac-
ters characterized large swaths of the ad game for decades
beginning in the late 1920s.
Higher-class magazines in the late ’20s were attractive
showcases for lavish ads that featured celebrities – mov-
ie stars, sports figures, musicians, even opera singers.
To no less a degree, they featured famous cartoonists and
illustrators, partly for the quality of their work, and partly
because their very signatures carried celebrity status. The
work of John Held, Jr., Ralph Barton, Norman Rockwell,
Maxfield Parrish, and J. C. Leyendecker were continually
on display in glossy magazines like Vanity Fair, The New
Yorker, and the old Life. The stylish cartoonist Lawrence
Fellows (Judge magazine) drew full-page gag cartoons,
always showing, and extolling, Kelly-Springfield Tires.
Winsor McCay, late of Little Nemo, transferred his skills
(and presumed authority) from the sermon-like editorial
cartoon allegories in the Hearst papers to ads for Lucky
Strike cigarettes. At the other end of the dignity-spectrum,
Dr. Seuss turned out scores of nonsense ads for the insecti-
cide Flit. The point is that cartoonists were hired for their
fame as well as their talent, and they ballyhooed everything
from luxury automobiles to those expensive, new-fangled
radio sets; from ocean cruises to Steinway grand pianos.
But that was the 1920s. With the Depression, changes
came to the genre of Cartoon Advertising.
Just as with other popular arts, advertising cartoon-
ing flourished, rather than suffered, in the Hard Times.
It was the Golden Age of Cartoon Ads, in the same ways
that comic strips increased in numbers, Sunday funny
sections swelled in size, comic books were born, Big
Little Books commenced, animated cartoons flourished,
and so forth. Virtually every aspect of American life was
affected by the Depression, of course, most things in a less
positive manner.
10
Central to our study is the nature of what was being
hyped in ads. Automobile manufacturers disappeared by
the score. Ocean cruises seemed a cruel chimera to many
Americans. Cheap radio receivers supplanted the carved-
wood elegancies, living-room shrines, that recently had
been advertised. Cartoonists continued to work: Agencies
still wanted to sell products, just the same, no matter their
price tags or pretentions. And popular cartoonists were ap-
preciated more than ever, as they made ads more accessible
to the public.
There was an interesting alteration in what was be-
ing advertised. The products were not just fewer, nor of
more plebeian appeal. There was a shift in the profile of
products. Perhaps reflecting the angst of Hard Times, the
insecurity of people, even if they had employment, became
the subtext of many products and their pitches. For in-
stance, automobile ads suffered an imperceptible decline, if
any; but luxury cars are less evident – the dominant theme
among the survivors was “affordability.” This is logical.
But more surprising, or revealing, we see among the car-
toon ads a growing preoccupation with bodily functions,
particularly personal flaws. In ways that put the patent-
medicine barkers of an earlier era to shame, a variety of
pastes, creams, lotions, pills, powders, and instruction
booklets rose to the fore. They promised fixes – sometimes
in bold letters spelling words that previously had been
impolite – for conditions like constipation, pimples, mal-
odorous breath, offensive body odor, smelly underclothes,
yellow or green teeth, ugly fat, skinniness, colonies of who-
knows-what growing between sweaty toes, facial hair on
women and baldness in men, speech impediments, shyness,
and – back to the intestinal tract – strange smells and noises.
The sociological implications of these sudden realiza-
tions, as revealed – or imputed – by the ads, are fascinat-
ing. Yes, advertisers ministered to or exploited (your pick)
a suddenly insecure society. But ad men were only serving
the clients who hired them, just as American business be-
lieved it was responding to social trends. Was the new wave
of products, and therefore the ads that shilled for them, the
other side of the coin we traditionally call Escapism?
It is interesting to see the new wave of Sunday funnies in
the ’30s. New categories of comic strips appeared. Science-
fiction strips, adventure continuities, cowboy features,
comics set in exotic jungles, and the breathless domains of
detectives. Readers travelled to other planets with Flash
Gordon, and other centuries with Buck Rogers. They en-
countered gorillas with Tarzan and the sorcerer Merlin
with Prince Valiant. They fought dinosaurs with Alley Oop
and bad guys with Dick Tracy. Winnie Winkle supported
her family, and Brenda Starr, Reporter was a model hero-
ine. Little Orphan Annie bucked the world, and invariably
prevailed. Superman and Batman saved the day, every day.
There were few characters with whom readers could actu-
ally identify in the comics pages. Annie, for instance, was
more an inspiration and a role model, than a character
whom children or adults saw as themselves. In “realistic”
strips, the characters were more mythic than realistic.
And then came the great equalizers: cartoon ads.
In a four-color version of Emerson’s Law of Compensa-
tion, every fantasizing, happy reader of the Sunday fun-
nies was brought back to earth by cartoon reminders, right
amidst the strips, that he was ostracized for having bad
breath or pimples, or she might never experience romance
because her blouses are not sparkling white, that those re-
pellent things at the ends of her arms are… dishpan hands.
Testimonials, once a mainstay of persuasive ads, some-
what shifted from celebrities. Big names still endorsed
certain products (cigarettes, laundry detergents, foods,
and candy) but many advertising testimonials substituted
comic-strip characters with, frankly, no personality or gen-
uine identity at all. Or generic models were photographed,
their faces bizarrely grafted onto cartoon bodies, to utter
their “before and after” stories. (One celebrity endorser,
Babe Ruth, did allow himself to be depicted recommending
a product that seemed a surprise for a famed athlete – a
laxative. Perhaps that explains the funny way he ran the
bases; or why he hit so many home runs. He needed some
way to get to the club house quickly.)
This great role reversal – comic-strip ads serving to yank In the Golden Age, certain products were pitched to the
readers back from realms of fantasy and escapism in the general population in the first place – think John Held,
funnies – are only half the story. There was a revolution Jr.’s cartoon ads for Timken ball bearings in popular family
brewing in the magazines, the original home to cartoon ad- magazines; Dr. Seuss for insecticides; the genteel Gluyas
vertising, too. Cartoon ads in the weeklies and monthlies Williams for brass pipe fittings. Beyond the assumption
in the Golden Age were of a slightly different order than that The Saturday Evening Post, say, would reach the same
newspaper comic-strip ads; the products were frequently dif- numbers, even the same readers, as subscribers to industry
ferent, and their stable of artists largely consisted of recog- trade-journals, we can suppose that the Cartoon Ad was
nized magazine cartoonists. There was some crossover (the regarded as an unparalleled advertising vehicle by many
magazines hyped laxatives and toothpaste as did the Sun- advertisers wherever it appeared.
day funnies; and some cartoonists worked both sides of the America has never shaken the mode of fawning over
MadAve street), but the advertised products were generally royalty, or at least nobility, and celebrities were American
more genteel in the magazines. And the cartoonists were avatars. When John McCutcheon married in 1917, and
mostly the names whose work graced the covers and single- George McManus or Billy DeBeck embarked on European
panel gags in the editorial guts of the magazines. Familiarity cruises in the 1920s, it was the stuff of newspaper gossip
breeds content, was the assumption of cartoon ad-makers. columns. Jack Benny’s Artists and Models was just one mo-
So with greater numbers of assignments, cartoon ads in tion picture to feature cartoonists in the cast; cartoonists
the comic sections and the magazines of the Depression were guests on radio shows. Therefore it was logical (in the
era carried heavier responsibilities to attract, persuade, world of American culture) to trust their endorsements of
and sell. The function of cartoon advertising, as with the automobile tires and diet supplements. Frankly, cartoon-
larger expressive traditions and roles of comic art, and the ists of this time were the rock stars of their day.
advertising profession of which cartoon ads are a subset, Their creations broke through and scrambled over the
are symptoms and not causes. So it is with all the popu- fourth wall, in effect fraternizing with potential custom-
lar arts; it is what makes Popular Culture so compelling. ers, the magazine reader. Many magazines had previ-
When a harder “sell” was needed as the Depression set in, ously treated the newspaper comics sections as enemy
familiar comics characters began populating ads in greater territory. But suddenly Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville cast
numbers than previously. They moved into the Sunday fun- of thousands; Mutt and Jeff; Skippy (who never really
nies like the Man Who Came to Dinner in the Depression. left); the Captain and the Kids; Rube Goldberg’s inven-
Eventually they were joined by characters created solely for tions; Al Capp’s hillbillies – all were romping through
ad campaigns; not famous characters moonlighting to hype the slicks… right alongside the magazine mainstays like
a product or nostrum, but characters exclusively identified Gluyas Williams and Otto Soglow.
with one product, usually drawn by a famous cartoonist

whose cachet made it all very reassuring.
Cartoonists themselves also became pitchmen to an un-
precedented degree. We can understand that Sidney (The
Gumps) Smith would be trusted on the subject of fast, pow-
erful luxury automobiles (after all, he would be killed in a
Rolls-Royce a few years after an ad appeared announcing
he received one as a bonus to his lavish new contract)… but
Percy (Skippy) Crosby on tomato juice? – except, of course,
as any other celebrities were looked to as advisors on any
thing. Enough cartoonists endorsed liquor and cigarettes
to lend an air of familiarity... and, certainly, believability.
A
s in so many other areas of cartoon history,
William Randolph Hearst, architect of the founda-
tions, proved himself open to innovation, never grow-
ing rusty. His organization put out the welcome mat for
changes in the Sunday funnies that ushered in cartoon ads.
Comics historian Ron Goulart has researched the paradigm
shift that began with cartoon ads in the color comics, much
of which was discussed in a lengthy, serious, statistic-laden
report in Fortune, the journal of American capitalism:
“Like many advertising innovations, cartoon ads, spe-
cifically strips, owe their existence to a survey. In 1931,

11
 Dr. George Gallup asked newspaper buyers some ques-
tions. He discovered that while only 40 per cent of them
read the main news story, a full 70 per cent read the comic
page. Over at the Hearst offices in Manhattan, these survey
figures inspired a Comic Weekly [the King Features Sunday
funnies section] staff member named Hawley Turner. With
the Gallup figures and some sample ad strips, Turner went
forth. In that grim business year of 1931, General Foods
was worried about the declining sales of its Grape-Nuts.
They became Turner’s first customers, and in May of that
year a series of funny-paper ads, done in a very simple car-
toon style, appeared among the real funnies. Soon Grape-
Nuts sales leveled, then started to climb. Once that fact
became known, other advertisers decided that comic-strip
advertising might boost their sales, too.
“The cost of advertising in the Comic Weekly, a funny-
paper section that appeared in 17 major Hearst newspa-
pers across the country each weekend with a combined
circulation of more than 5-million, was between $16,000
and $17,500 per full page. That
was considerably higher than the
previous top price for a full page
in The Saturday Evening Post.
Hearst, however, could prom-
ise more than twice the Post’s
readership each week; and the
cartoon ads were obviously sell-
ing the products.
“Soon the rival Metropolitan
Sunday Newspaper combine was
born. It offered 11 big-city papers
including the Chicago Tribune
and the New York Daily News.
The prices were comparable,
with a half page going for $9000
and a full for $17,000. In the first
year in the business of selling
cartoon ads, the Comic Weekly
earned more than one million
dollars from them; eventually
Metro Sunday Comics was doing
nearly as well.
“Not surprisingly, organiza-
tions grew up to provide cartoon
and comic-format material for the
advertising agencies. Hearst’s
King Features Syndicate had an in-
house staff for such work, and also
licensed many of its defunct com-
ic-strip characters for the new
medium: Dumb Dora, Jerry on
the Job, Joys and Glooms, and the
venerable Alphonse and Gaston.”
The contributions of another
ad agency, Johnstone and Cushing, is so important that we
devote a section of the book, and an essay by Tom Heintjes,
to their work alone [page 117]. Briefly, Johnstone and
Cushing’s hundreds of cartoon ads through the decades
represent a wide swath of middle-level, middle-class, fa-
miliar products: cultural comfort food of the Lumpenpro-
letariat American society. Virtually without exception, the
agency’s ads were designed around cartoons, almost always
comic-strip formats. Their ads appeared in magazines, but
overwhelmingly the showcase was the Sunday comics sec-
tion, some daily strips, but mostly color Sunday-format
pages. There was a “stealth” component to this mode, in
that some readers likely read halfway through a Johnstone
and Cushing strip before they realized it was an advertise-
ment, not a regular comic. Chances are that most readers
were more charitable than Ralphie’s response – “A crum-
my commercial! Son of a bitch!” – because Johnstone and
Cushing cartoon ads worked. Sales response proved that.
When I was Comics Editor of Field Newspaper Syndicate,
I made the acquaintance of a Brazilian-born cartoonist,
12
Fernando da Silva, who was offered an assistant’s job by
Alex Raymond just prior to Raymond’s death in an auto
accident. Fred moved to the US anyway and became a lead-
ing advertising artist (working, among other commissions,
in the style of Bob Peak on Marlboro cigarette print ads).
When I met him, he was drawing cartoons for Wrigley’s
Fun Facts, an innocuous strip of Believe-It-Or-Not type
vignettes that ran in many Sunday newspapers (the final
fun fact, of course, always hyping some aspect of a Wrigley
chewing-gum product). Numerous surveys revealed that
the Fun Facts feature was more popular with readers than
many traditional comic strips. For a while, I entertained the
idea of enticing Fred to draw an actual cartoon along these
lines, instead of a cartoon ad masquerading as a syndicat-
ed feature. But of course my logic was faulty: Why would
editors pay for a feature that attracted readers, when they
were already being paid good money to run a popular fea-
ture that attracted readers? (Fred later drew the Rex Mor-
gan, M.D. strip for Field, and I have always seen it as a sort
of cosmic consolation-prize, even
if he did not.)
Returning to Johnstone and
Cushing from this relevant
tangent (the Wrigley account was
handled by Chicago’s McCann-
Ericson), the final building-block
of the J&C agency’s success was
its ability to hire the top names
and best talents in cartoons,
comics, and illustration. Its
legendary “stable” included
Milton Caniff, Noel Sickles,
Albert Dorne (founder of the
Famous Artists School), Rube
Goldberg, Al Capp, William Steig,
Dik Browne, Leonard Starr, Stan
Drake, Lou Fine, Virginia Huget,
Dudley Fisher, Stan Randall, Mal
Eaton, Frank Godwin, Darrell
McClure, Gill Fox, Creig Flessel,
and Neal Adams.
Co-Founder Tom Johnstone
was a restless, creative sort who
had been comics editor for the
Pulitzer syndicate operation,
and a Broadway songwriter; he
kept a piano in his ad office and
would knock out tunes at ran-
dom moments during the day.
His brother, Will B. Johnstone,
was a longtime political cartoon-
ist, principally with the New York
World, and collaborated with
Tom on the book and music of
the Marx Brothers’ first stage hit, I’ll Say She Is (1924).
Will remained with the Marx Brothers, writing screenplays
and gags for several more of their movies, sometimes in
partnership with S. J. Perelman or Morrie Ryskind.
The fees that cartoonists were paid for comic-strip ads
during the Depression were magnificent: $500 to $1000
per half-page, according to Ron Goulart. Technically,
Johnstone and Cushing usually was the middleman for the
middlemen – serving larger ad agencies rather than clients
directly; the cartoonists and J&C routinely split half and
half, which was still a good rate for most commercial art-
ists at the time. But sometimes the cartoonists were free
to work directly for the client, and the agency collected a
mere commission.
Meanwhile cartoonists who did magazine ads continued
to thrive in a less volatile medium. The family weeklies,
the “slicks,” and even dignified outlets like The New Yorker
and Saturday Review of Literature, generally appealed
to readers’ interests (and presumably their intelligence)
more than to their stomachs and armpits as in the comic
sections. Which is not be confused with a higher level of
truth in advertising: just a subtler delivery.
W
e are all victims of persuasion and propaganda,
the unavoidable side-effect of sentience. However,
most of us willingly consume cartoon ads before
we consume the products, no matter whether we wanted
or needed to, or ever heard of them. More than celebrity
endorsements, perhaps, and second to the sexual pitch, car-
toons put us in a mood to love the product. “Lie to us,” we
say, suspending disbelief as we alter our decisions – some
them important decisions – based on recommendations of,
sometimes, talking ducks.
But what a way to go: the best cartoonists, doing their
best work, usually do flummox us. We want them to. Some
future anthropologist will discover why we are skeptical of
philosophers and theologians, but trusting of cartoon char-
acters. Strange but true. “Believe It or Not.”
In cartoon ads, artists had to do their best work, not
because the competition was stiff between freelance adver-
tising cartoonists. Cartoonists knew they had to appeal to
our hearts, straight-on; and mug our skulls, from behind.
No mean trick, to execute such assignments. Persuade the
reader that he or she had, say, B.O.; assure him that friends
were avoiding him or her and holding their noses at the
other end of the office; and convince him or her that life
could not continue, but would in fact be paradisiacal, if he
or she scrubbed with one bar of soap and not another. All
through funny drawings.
But the American Dream consists in part of creating a
need, filling that need, and servicing the needy. It, um, cre-
ates jobs and keeps the wheels of the economy rolling. Once
upon a time – here I am inviting you to sweep your eyes
across the landscape of human history – technology and
invention, and the arts, filled needs, not created the per-
ception of needs. Art (representational art, writing, design,
and, yes, even cartoons) served to inform, elevate, amuse.
Sometimes art-for-art’s-sake; sometimes in the service of
God or important causes, or, cynically, even in the service
of frauds or scoundrels. But seldom in the archaeological
records of any civilizations do we see the cultures’ greatest
artists applying their talents to persuading the masses to
need, want, purchase, and consume particular sorts of cos-
metics, antiemetics, undergarments, pimple removers, or
things that satisfied a sweet tooth or made chariots shiny.
Ah, but that is capitalism, mostly a beautiful thing. Any-
thing that has an upside, however, logically has a downside.
If a culture of advertising, stoked by the presence and ef-
fectiveness of cartoons, might suggest cultural decay – art
for anti-art’s sake – we at least ought to recognize it, the
better to celebrate it clearly. In a democracy we cannot re-
verse it. Unlike tooth decay, the culture has no effective
decay-preventve dentifrice that can be used in a conscien-
tiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular profes-
sional care. America is a consumer-oriented society; that is
axiomatic. But to “inform” the consumer consistenly has
been far down the list of priorities.
Cartoons and comics frequently have sugar-coated the
medicine of commercialism. Where truth is told, they
have made it accessible. Where tenuous product claims
are made, cartoon ads have helped explain. Where a prod-
uct’s nonsense is evident, cartoon ads make it, instead,
appealing. Where lies are told, cartoon ads make the lies
seem irrelevant.
… but at all times, they have made it fun.
On these pages you see the warp and woof of America’s
off-brand of High Art: popular culture. Whether shilling
innocent toys or solemnly convincing readers that ciga-
rettes are beneficial to the lungs, cartoonists and illustra-
tors, like the ad men who directed them, were mad men
too. We consumers also are mad, enjoying every minute
of it – because, of course, we all secretly know what is
true and what is not. Right? (It was funny, though, that
the great cartoonists from the Johnstone and Cushing
stable, when I got to know them in later years, uniformly
expressed indifference or sometimes hostility to the prod-
ucts they hyped…)
So let us see what Jean Shepherd wrote about, what the
Statler Brothers sang about. And what saved generations
of Americans from smelly armpits and dishpan hands.
13
(1890)
1877
to
1910
The Origins of Cartoon Advertising
I
t could be said that cartoon ads existed from America’s earli-
est days, in the form of political cartoons – but that would
not be truth in advertising-cartoons. In the sense that car-
toons are sketches or shorthand illustrations, and that fo-
menting rebellion and forming a political union were causes
to be advertised… then Ben Franklin and Paul Revere were
the first American advertising cartoonists.
But our story really begins at the time when cartooning be-
came a recognized profession in America, thanks to the suc-
cess of illustrated journalism and humorous weeklies, in the
1870s. Thomas Nast and Joseph Keppler, of Harper’s Weekly
and Puck, molded national opinions with their political car-
toons. It was a small step and a great temptation for them to
moonlight. Nast was already a book illustrator and a political
cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly; and Keppler drew posters and
announcements for German-immigrant social events in New
York during his early years on Puck. Ads were in the purview
of these cartoonists, and their imprimatur was valuable to ad-
vertisers.
The next generation of cartoon ad men were more suitable
for general assignments, because their cartoons were wider
ranging. Frederick Burr Opper, a Puck staff cartoonist; and
Palmer Cox, who did animal cartoons for the humor version
of Life and was father to the beloved children’s cartoons The
Brownies, drew serious illustrations and humorous cartoons
as ads.
After the Yellow Kid increased the popularity of the car-
toon, and reinforced the perception of cartoonists’ influence
on the public, the stars of the comic weeklies and the Sunday
Funnies found a permanent second home for their work.
 (1877)

(1874) (1877)

top Protected from the calamities of everyday life behind the shield of Travelers Insurance is (an inside joke?) cartoonist Joseph Keppler of Puck, in a self portrait.

16
 (1890)

The originator of the Republican elephant and the cartoonist who standardized the Democrat donkey, and the Santa Claus we know today, Thomas Nast was the most famous
cartoonist of his day. President Lincoln called Nast “the North’s best recruiting sergeant” for his cartoon work; and every schoolchild once knew that Nast’s cartoons toppled the
corrupt “Tweed Ring” of New York’s Tammany Hall. This ad for the Eastern Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia (ET, V&G) Railroad was one of the few ads he drew for clients
other than his own Almanac or Harper’s Weekly.

17
 (1877) (1877)

(1877)

Ads by Joseph Keppler, founder and, in its earliest days, chief provider of cartoons and advertising art to his Puck magazine.

18
 (1891)

Frederick Burr Opper, as one of America’s most popular cartoonists, would be expected to show up in any list of cartoon ads of the period. A full-color back page in Puck combined his
comic sense and illustrator’s prowess, selling pianos.

19
 (1886)

(1879)

bottom Joseph Keppler, the founder and chief cartoonist of Puck, shows President Rutherford B. Hayes and his predecessor Ulysses S. Grant smoking
cigars with retired Union General Benjamin Butler. Grant was an inveterate smoker – and was to die of throat cancer in half a dozen years – but Hayes
likely was not; he banned liquor from all White House functions during his presidency.

20
(1894)

(ca. 1900s)

The game maker Selchow and Richter, still active today, promoted six of their games, including “Parcheesi,” in the first decade of the 20th century; two of their six games were comic-
strip licenses: Buster Brown and Foxy Grandpa.

21
 (1902)

above The Gold Dust Twins were among the first “mascots” of cartoon advertising –
characters created, not “imported,” as endorsers of products. E. W. Kemble, illustrator
of Huckleberry Finn, was chosen for many ads; one of his cartooning specialties was
Black characters. The Brownies of Palmer Cox were popular cartoon characters whose
adventures in multiple panels with running rhymed narratives led to appearances in
magazines, books, Sunday Funnies… and cartoon ads. They endorsed Londonderry
Lithia water previous page top, and are reputed to have inspired the name of the
diminutive box camera of Eastman Kodak, the Brownie.

right Two of many Happy Hooligan licensing products are from a series of 10 postcards,
which were issued both with generic greetings, and with advertisers’ messages.
(1904)

22
 (1907)

Gustave Verbeek was a busy cartoonist in magazines and newspapers from the ’90s
into the ’teens. His father, a Moravian/Dutch émigré to the United States, became a
missionary to Japan and was much honored for sharing the faith and establishing
educational institutions. His son shared good humor and established memorable
characters as an American cartoonist. His strip Terrors of the Tiny Tads ran in the
New York Herald and other newspapers via syndication. The enterprising Verbeek
established an agency of cartoon advertising, whereby local merchants could send
their customers monthly calendars, cartoons, and sales pitches. Verbeek personally
hand wrote messages, urging a potential customer to subscribe to his service.

23
 (1908)

One of the most prolific cartoonists in the first decade of the comic strip was Clare Victor Dwiggins – “Dwig.” He drew many Sunday pages for the New York
World and the McClure Syndicate; book illustrations; sheet music art for early Ragtime piano; and many hundreds of popular postcards. The postcards often
featured his own version of the Gibson Girl (every cartoonist had one), and sometimes promoted brands (bread) or products (sausages. Yes, these are sausages).

24
 (1908)

At the height of Little Nemo’s popularity, cartoonist Winsor McCay (“Silas”) designed covers for catalogs of New York City’s spectacular entertainment venue, the
Hippodrome, which was touted by its owners as being the largest theater in the world.

25
 (1895)

A visit to the Library of Congress’ Copyright Division, the bowels of their ancient card- facing page An example of how Outcault’s cartoons were pitched to advertisers, showing
file records, reveals multiple drawers of registration cards filed by R. F. Outcault and the how the cartoons might in turn be used in pitches to customers.
Outcault Advertising Agency.
26

It is appropriate that the nexus of cartoons
and advertising is in the cartoonist who is
credited as the Father of newspaper com-
ic. Richard Felton Outcault was “in at the
creation” of many things, beginning down in
Hogan’s Alley.
R. F. Outcault (1863-1928) did not create
the comic strip. There were a few regularly ap-
pearing characters in the Sunday newspapers
before the Yellow Kid, but there was some-
thing about the urchin in a nightshirt that
commanded readers’ attention as other car-
toons did not. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley was
the inspiration that made every newspaper
in America want its own comic section; and
the Yellow Kid’s was the face that launched a
thousand strips. In the process, the jug-eared
pioneer appeared in countless licensing and
merchandising permutations, and become an
unlikely salesman in many cartoon ads. After
the Yellow Kid, most American newspapers
had to have colored supplements; comic strips
with panels and speech balloons were codified;
and a new form of storytelling established it-
self in the arts and the American culture.
No less important were the commercial
influences, and implications, that swirled
around the activities of R. F. Outcault. In
the colored newspaper cartoon an industry
was born, commercial rivalries incited, and
endless spinoffs resulted. The Yellow Kid did
not so much presage but embodied the vari-
ety of licensing and merchandising uses that
cartoons and cartoonists were to assume.
Cartoons like Hogan’s Alley advertised their
newspapers… they would advertise prod-
ucts… and ultimately promote themselves.
Outcault perhaps was destined to be more
of a commercial cartoonist than most of his
peers. An early job was as a staff artist with
Thomas Alva Edison’s exhibition at the 1889
Paris World’s Fair. If Edison was anything
Portfolio:
other than inventive he was entrepreneurial,
and a worthwhile role model for Outcault.
Freelancing cartoons for Truth and other
small publications, Outcault cracked the
mighty New York World and specialized in
slum cartoons in the style of Michael Angelo
Woolf and other magazine cartoonists. His
drawings increased in size, in varieties of col-
ors… and in cast. The crowded genre cartoons
in 1895 and 1896 eventually centered on the
barefoot gamin Mickey Dugan; and the public
loved him.
Soon there were Yellow Kid songs, Yellow
Kid cigarettes, Yellow Kid crackers, a Yellow
Kid Broadway musical, Yellow Kid chewing
gum, Yellow Kid buttons, Yellow Kid soap,
and a Yellow Kid magazine. More, the Yellow
Kid “endorsed” all manner of products, from
cigars to tea.
Just as remarkable as Outcault’s instant
success was his perspicacity. A relatively un-
known cartoonist in a field where even celeb-
rity writers were time-clock workers, he was
able to secure a degree of copyright protection
and freedom to exploit his characters inde-
pendently. Cartoonists garnered limited re-
spect within their journalistic empires; editor
Arthur Brisbane once was asked if cartoonists
were newspapermen, and he supposedly an-
swered, “Is a barnacle a ship?” But, until the
1930s, cartoons and comic strips were largely
viewed by newspapers not as revenue-genera-
tors but as audience-attractors.
Therefore part of Outcault’s genius was
realizing that he could run with his Kid.
If the public wanted more of him, he was hap-
py to oblige. When William Randolph Hearst
became the most covetous fan and lured
Outcault to his New York American, a battle
ensued with the World’s publisher Joseph
Pulitzer. Significantly, the competition was
not for a share of the character’s commercial
activities nor Outcault’s advertising rev-
enues, but just for the exclusive right to the
newspaper cartoons.
In a few years the public, or Outcault,
tired of the Yellow Kid. But the cartoonist
did not tire of newspaper cartoons. In 1902
he created another character who starred in
his own strip, and scaled higher commercial
heights than even the Yellow Kid: Buster
Brown. Buster, the mischief maker of a pros-
perous family (Hogan’s Alley’s slums were in
Outcault’s distant past), caught America’s
fancy as much for his inevitable pranks
as his inevitable “resolution” at the end of
each adventure.
Buster, too, was lured to the Hearst pa-
pers in a few years, countless products and
product endorsements following in his wake.
Buster Brown shoes, Buster Brown hosiery,
Buster Brown reprint books, a Buster Brown
musical. Buster, like his scruffy forebear, “en-
dorsed” many products, from toiletries to
baked goods.
Outcault had the commercial zeal to
establish his own advertising agency, appro-
priately The Outcault Advertising Agency.
Headquartered in Chicago, Outcault churned
out thousands of cartoon ads between
approximately 1907 and his death in 1928. His
vehicles were newspaper and magazine ads,
postcards, booklets, flyers, buttons, and
pinbacks. Buster was featured in many, and
the Yellow Kid popped up now and again, but
Outcault also created other characters spe-
cific to ad campaigns, and, in his Gibson style,
drew cartoon illustrations of people flogging
banks, watches, and department stores.
Buster Brown Shoes is a brand that
exists today, emblem of the Advertising
journey from which R. F. Outcault never
rested, and that generations of cartoonists
have followed.
(1903)
27
 (ca. 1890s)

28
 (1912)

(ca. 1890s)

(1896) (1896)

The little Yellow Kid, Mickey Dugan, was a prolific salesman. These examples show him shilling for hardware stores, ginger snaps, and High Admiral cigarettes, on more
than 100 of whose pinback premiums Outcault’s Kid appeared.

29
 (1904)

Pages from three of the booklets published to promote Buster Brown shoes. The lithographed art was not by Outcault (a
departure for the hands-on cartoonist) but the profits were; Buster Brown continues to be a brand of children’s shoes.
30
(ca. 1900s)

31
 (1905)

32
 (1904)

(1906)

Merchants could order blank cards from the Outcault Agency and imprint their own messages, or have them delivered pre-printed.

33
 (1907)

(1909)

top The family depicted in this cartoon ad resembled Outcault’s own – children the ages of Dick, Jr., and Mary Jane (also the name of Buster Brown’s girl friend); and a
father with waxed moustaches, as Outcault sported.
34
(1907)

35
 (1907)

Ralph Barton was the versatile cartoonist whose work ranged from proto-Erté fashion drawings to brilliant caricatures for Puck, Judge, Photoplay, Vanity
Fair, and The New Yorker; to book illustrations, including for the best-selling Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos.
 1910
to
s
WWI
CARTOON ADS GO TO WAR
A
s the comic strip established itself in the ’teens, car-
toon ads reflected the popular characters of the day,
like Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff, Frederick Opper’s
Happy Hooligan, and George McManus’ Jiggs and Maggie
(Bringing Up Father).
Some cartoonists established their bona fides as entrepre-
neurs. Gustave Verbeek followed the example of Outcault, and
put his characters to work in a postcard-advertising enterprise.
He custom-lettered ad copy for clothing shops, banks, restau-
rants, and department stores across the continent. Between
1907 and 1915 the Tiny Tads Co. provided postcards with char-
acters from Verbeek’s Terrors of the Tiny Tads Sunday page.
Winsor McCay followed Outcault from southern Ohio
to New York, as a cartoonist and as a pitchman. With the
success of his Little Nemo, McCay found the character in
demand as a spokesman for cutlery sets, reticulated pa-
per dolls, and, eventually, garden implements. Commer-
cial opportunities flowed from the successful Broadway
operetta, and road-show touring company, of Little Nemo
(music by Victor Herbert). McCay the stylish and decorative
cartoonist executed program covers for the Hippodrome, and
eventually became the cartooning spokesman for a cigarette’s
ad campaign.
Just as Ben Franklin and Paul Revere had drawn cartoons
to sell the Revolution; and Thomas Nast’s Civil War car-
toons earned Abe Lincoln’s compliment – “The North’s best
recruiting sergeant” – cartoonists snapped to attention and
supported America’s intervention in the Great War.
 (ca. 1910s)

(ca. 1910s)

top Rose O’Neill’s Kewpies were successes in magazines, comics, and as stars of many ads.

bottom left A 1917 flyer for a neighborhood performance of Happy Hooligan – either live ac-
tors or animated cartoon – got mixed up with a drawing of the Dingbat Family, and an early
Krazy Kat, by George Herriman.

bottom right A small sample of approximately 500 pinbacks of comic-strip characters, pro-
moting the Tokio and Hassan brands of cigarettes, ca. 1912-14.
(1917)

38
 (1910)

Life magazine was an early proponent of the United States’ intervention in World War 1. Once the US entered the war, Life combined patriotic fervor with shilling for subscriptions.
The endorsement of the Gibson Girl’s creator, Charles Dana Gibson, counted for much.

39
40
 (1918)

Winsor McCay agitated for American intervention in World War I by producing, virtually single-handedly, the animated propaganda film The Sinking of
the Lusitania; in print venues he produced color posters such as these. The War Department needed the likes of Winsor McCay to make deployment to
Siberia at $30 a month seem exciting.

(1918) 41
 (1918)

(1918) (1918)

For the Third Liberty Loan in April 1918, the Liberty Loan Committee engaged no fewer than than 50 cartoonists to draw cartoons urging Americans to empty their wallets to
support the Doughboys overseas. In addition to posters, flyers, and ads in newspapers, magazines and trolley cars, over 5,000,000 copies of The Cartoon Book were printed and
distributed as part of this advertising campaign across the United States.

42
 (1918) (1919)

(1918) (1918)

bottom left Journalist, writer, and cartoonist John T. McCutcheon was among several American cartoonists who visited European battlefields in various capacities during World
War I. Shortly after war broke out in 1914, McCutcheon was arrested, on suspicion of spying, by the German Army as it overran Belgium. Upon his release, he flew over the front in a
German plane, and spent a few weeks touring the German lines – something the French did not look kindly upon when McCutcheon wanted to visit the front again, with the French
Army in 1915.

43
 (1895)

Homer Davenport was, with Jimmy Swinnerton, the chief cartoonist for young William Randolph Hearst when he launched his newspaper empire in San Francisco. This colored
songsheet, a giveaway with the Examiner, is a vestige of stereotypes of an earlier day – and one that the American comic strip helped ameliorate. Magazines, with their specialized
readerships, considered it safe to engage in hackneyed ethnic clichés. But newspapers depended on mass circulation, all segments of the population. Racial groups soon were
depicted in a more benign manner, until offensive stereotypes all but disappeared in the comics, generally in advance of society as a whole.
44

SHEET MUSIC
Music staves and notations are boring no
matter what the music they represent. Music
publishers festooned the covers of sheet mu-
sic with attractive and colorful artwork to at-
tract customers as soon as technology allowed.
Cartoonists were among the go-to artists for
the job.
Portfolio:
Cartoonists illuminated the covers of songs
devoted to their strips, or music from shows
built upon their characters. The Hearst
and Pulitzer newspaper chains frequently
included free songsheets in their Sunday news-
papers, with special art by staff cartoonists
and illustrators.
Tin Pan Alley and ragtime publishers also
called on popular cartoonists to boost sales
of their scores. The need to advertise songs
– and indeed the genres themselves, because
certain types of music craved respectability –
put a premium on quality cartoons by promi-
nent artists.
(ca. 1890)
45
 (1910)

(1905)

(1910)

(1917)

46
(1906)

47
 (1923)
(1930)
bottom left Art imitated art as The New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno helped craft
a play about the people inhabiting the city for which the magazine was named. This
song from the play, “Love for Sale,” was banned from many radio stations as a
result of its heady and risqué reference to prostitution, its Cole Porter lyrics touting
“Love for sale / If you want to buy my wares / follow me and climb the stairs.”
This musical is a curiously forgotten association of the legendary New Yorker.
48
(1930)
(1937)
bottom right Russell Patterson, who helped define the “flapper” look of the 1920s,
drew the cover for the sheet music from the Jack Benny movie… and appeared in the
film as well. So did cartoonists Rube Goldberg and Peter Arno, and illustrators Arthur
William Brown and McClelland Barclay.
 (1945)

Jimmy Durante and his famous “schnozzola” are here surrounded by the cast of funny-pages characters from King
Features Syndicate. The design was taken from in-house KFS stationery (this example, a letter by Vern “Bringing
Up Father” Greene, written to the young Rick Marschall).
(1944)

49
1920s
THE JAZZ ERA

C
artoon ad men of the 1920s did not generally promote
their characters, or use them as “spokesmen.” Their
artwork was solicited because the cartoonists themselves
were celebrities – that is, for the value of their signatures.
And, of course, for the clever cartoon work they brought to the
ads, and ultimately to the products.
The 1920s saw the rise of the magazine cartoonist as
advertising artist. Gluyas Williams, Charles Dana Gibson,
John Held, Jr., “Fish,” Dr. Seuss, and others frequently
advertised products in the same pages where their popular
cartoons appeared in daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals.

(ca. 1920)
 (ca. 1920’s)

(ca. 1920s) (1926)

52
 (1925)
(1927)

above Not to be forgotten in the examination of cartoon ads is that comics sold newspapers. Papers frequently used comic-strip characters in their own
promotion… and so did newspaper syndicates to their clients, the local editors. This large calendar was issued by Hearst’s King Features Syndicate in
1925 and presumably hung in newspaper offices across America. If we can infer from the grid the relative popularity of King’s strips, they were Bringing
Up Father, Boob McNutt, Polly and Her Pals, Krazy Kat, Little Jimmy, and Barney Google.

right A statuette given away as another King Features promotion, its annual “Lark” banquet for the newspaper industry in New York.

53
 (1911)

(1915)

(ca. 1910s)

54

Newspapers and magazines were not the
only venues for cartoon advertising. National
companies sought national audiences, of
course. Local retailers had meager budgets,
and frequently no use, for national or even
regional publishing vehicles.
Cartoon ads came to the rescue once again.
Back in the day it was common to see favorite
cartoonists’ drawings or strips on calendars
and blotters. We are reasonably confident
that contemporary readers will know what
calendars are, but blotters might require an
Portfolio:
BLOTTERS
explanation. Before ball-point pens were widely
used, fountain pens were the inka franca of
correspondence and business transactions.
They were elegant, but they were pesky: the
ink frequently dried slowly. In ancient times,
ground sand was sprinkled on paper, absorbing
the wet-ink residue. Hence, the blotter. Porous
paper on one side; a smooth finished paper –
one that would take printing and advertising!
– on the other. Eventually the underside would
look like road maps of Los Angeles, with all
the blotted ink lines, but before discarding,
the user would have seen the cartoon ad scores
of times.
Blotters invariably were given away by
businesses whose names accompanied the
cartoons; calendars were frequent Christmas-
season giveaways. These items, an entire genre
of cartoon advertising, were halfway houses
between the advertising postcards of Outcault
and Verbeek and animated TV commercials
and internet pop-ups with cartoon characters.
(ca. 1940s)
55
 (1948)

56
 (1932)

(ca. 1940s)

(ca. 1940s)

(ca. 1940s)

(ca. 1940s) (ca. 1940s)

57
 (1924)

(ca. 1920s)

(ca. 1920s)

top two Sidney Smith’s The Gumps achieved such popularity in the
1920s that it spawned many licensing and merchandising products;
and its hero Andy Gump ran for the American presidency in a mock,
but earnest and detailed, campaign. The strip was a unique blend
of humor, melodrama, adventure, and slapstick. Meanwhile, George
McManus’s character Jiggs, a laborer turned nouveau-riche, adorned
the accoutrements his wife Maggie adopted in her new lifestyle (like
the drink coaster, bottom left).

bottom right In Great Britain, “Heath Robinsons” are the equivalent

of “Rube Goldberg contraptions,” which they antedated, in the US.
William Heath Robinson started as a book illustrator, but his fine
line and absurd view of machinery found a more permanent home in
single-panel cartoons and cartoon advertisements in England and
America.

facing page In fact, literally the opposite of Andy Gump and Jiggs,
were the characters of the urbane Gluyas Williams, one of the most
sought-after advertising cartoonists of his time.
(1926)

58 (1934)
59
 (1926)

top Charles Dana Gibson still had appeal, a generation after creating the Gibson Girl in the pages of the
old cartoon magazine Life… or, to be precise, his iconic women did. Here the Gibson Girl’s classic face and
figure have been updated for the less modest Roaring Twenties.

right Nize Baby was Milt Gross’s Yiddish dialect feature in the New York World. Its immense popularity
– a Sunday comic strip; appearances in the daily feature Gross Exaggerations; and best-selling book
collection – might have eclipsed movie star Harry Langdon, whose movie this ad promoted.
(1926)

60
 (1926)

William Donahey’s Teenie Weenies endorsed many products, most of them the fare of Monarch Foods, in print ads, booklets, food containers, and toys.

61
 (1927)

Otto Soglow drew illustrations and cartoons for the Communist New Masses magazine. He worked for this publication for a few years, focusing on social and class-struggle cartoons
that stylistically were influenced by John Sloan and other teachers at the Art Students League. At the same time, he was being published by the more upscale New Yorker magazine,
where his trademark cleaner line characterized his popular and long-running creation, The Little King.

62

THE LEFTIES
Prior to World War II, Communist and
Socialist were not the epithets they are in
contemporary America. Both groups fielded
Presidential tickets, the quadrennial candi-
date Eugene V. Debs garnering more than
900,000 votes for the Socialists in 1920 (while
he sat in jail on sedition charges). Magazines
like The Liberator and The New Masses gave
a voice to the positions of these groups…
Portfolio:
and served as training grounds for some well-
known cartoonists.
Art Young was the Father, if not Grand-
father, of the left-wing political cartooning
world. He was a mainstay of The Masses,
eventually contributing to a variety of radical
publications. Otto Soglow and Syd Hoff (using
his lefty alter ego of “A. Redfield”) cut some
of their early cartoon chops in these radical
magazines, Hoff supplementing his New
Yorker income with “Redfield” cartoons in the
Communist Daily Worker. These cartoonists
undertook commercial work for advertisers
and causes off the leftist “reservation” of their
comrades. They (and Art Young) also drew for
William Randolph Hearst, regarded then by
the Left as a proto-Fascist.
(1921)
63
 (1935)

Art Young was a still-fighting 68 years old when he drew this ad for one of many anti-war rallys held in the 1930s, that was published in the very left of center magazine The New
Masses. The speakers included Earl Browder, who was the United States Communist Party General Secretary, and Heywood Broun, the rabble rousing newspaper columnist who
was booted out of the Socialist Party for politically cavorting with the Communists.

64
 (1935) (1937)

(1935)

top left Syd Hoff led a double life as a cartoonist. He had as his alter ego A. Redfield (an unsubtle play on words) as a Communist, anti-capitalist rabble-rouser for the Communist
publications The Daily Worker and The New Masses. As Syd Hoff, he was published in such magazines as The New Yorker, focusing his cartoons on the travails of lower middle-
class life, while collecting a paycheck in clear contradiction to the precepts of his Communist brethren.

65

facing page top left Herbert Johnson was the long-time political cartoonist for The
Saturday Evening Post. Advertisers in the SEP likely requested Johnson to illustrate
their ads due to readers’ identification with his work elsewhere in the magazine.
facing page bottom left Don Herold was a cartoonist, writer, noted epigrammist (a
latter-day Oliver Herford), and ad man. His minimalist style was in demand by ad
agencies. He wrote a vital handbook, Humor in Advertising.
66
(1929)
facing page top right Herb Roth was a contributor of cartoons to magazines such as the old
humor version of Life, as well as being a book illustrator and having commercial contracts.
But his long term job security laid with being the famous H.T. Webster’s assistant, taking over
from no less than the legendary Roy Crane.
facing page bottom right Charles Sykes was the long-time political cartoonist who drew for
both the old Life magazine as well as for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, which was owned by
the Curtis Company that also published The Saturday Evening Post.
(1929)

(1929)

(1929) (1929)

67
 (1929)

Black and white; color; bastard-woodcut style; trademark Jazz-Age “flapper” style – John Held, Jr. was a master of design and composition always in demand by ad agencies. O
tempora, o mores! Would the work of a major cartoonist, today, in a leading general-interest national magazine, adorn a full page advertisement for… ball bearings?

68
(1929)

69
 (ca. 1890s)

(ca. 1896)

Once upon a match, unlike today, comic characters could smoke and be depicted
smoking. Even children (like the Yellow Kid), women (like Martin Branner’s
Winnie Winkle) and cartoonists themselves (Mutt and Jeff’s Bud Fisher).

70

The most impressive ads through the years, in
terms of quality design, prominent placements,
clever copywriting, celebrity endorsements,
and the best “talent” – cartoonists, illustra-
tors and photographers – have been products at
the highest and lowest ends of the retail spec-
trum: automobiles and cigarettes. Carmakers
needed to persuade customers to make major
investments. Cigarette manufacturers needed
to flummox customers into overcoming a host
of hesitations.
Portfolio:
TOBACCO
Cigarettes were effeminate? Get artists to
show “real men” smoking them.
Cigarettes were annoying in social settings?
Get artists to show society folk and groups of
smiling friends smoking them.
Cigarettes made your teeth yellow? Get art-
ists to show handsome and pretty smokers with
dazzling white smiles.
Cigarettes made you short of breath?
Get artists to depict athletes with cigarettes be-
tween their fingers or lips.
(ca. 1930s)
Cigarettes ruin your voice? Get artists to fea-
ture singers and actors clinging to their butts.
Cigarettes destroy your health? Get artists to
portray doctors and scientists swearing to the
positive benefits of smoking.
Cartoon ads, as much as florid copy graced by
top-notch illustrators, and high-toned celebrity-
photography, enabled generations of Americans
to feel good about the “evil weed.” The direct
correlation between an odious product and lav-
ish ad campaigns is apparent with cigarette ads.
(1912)
(1905)
71
 (1923)
(1928)

(ca .1920s)

top and bottom right The light, clean line and somewhat ribald gags were trademarks, in ads
for Murad cigarettes, of Fish, nom de plume of the British cartoonist Ann Septon. Her cartoons
ran in Vanity Fair in the US, and The Tatler and the English edition of Vogue.

bottom left James Pinkney Alley created his signature cartoon panel Hambone’s Meditations
for the Memphis Tennessean in 1916. Popular enough to warrant its own cigar brand, the
feature ran until 1968 (then drawn by J. P. “Cal” Alley, Jr.), by which time the musings of an
old, post Civil War African-American succumbed to more modern aesthetics.
(1929)

72
 (1936) (1941)

(1939)

top left The classy artwork of Frank Godwin (Connie, Rusty Riley) top right Drawing the middle ground between proletarian artwork for leftist publications and the very
anonymously graced a Camel campaign of 1936. bourgeois Little King, cartoonist Otto Soglow kept busy hyping pipe tobacco to the leisure class.

73
 (1929) (1929)

(1929) (1929)

Winsor McCay, father of animation, creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland, and master editorial cartoonist, was also a shill for tobacco companies. His fame as a pictorial
sermonizer in the Hearst newspapers provided implications through solemn drawings (and ad men’s pseudo-scientific copy) to smokers. This major campaign ran in many
magazines and newspapers, the horrid “ancient prejudices” (against tobacco) playing on the public’s disapproval of Prohibition and censorship in the 1920s.

74
 (1936)

(1939)

top Prince Albert was in a tin. Many cartoonist ad men labored in anonymity. This artwork is by Nicholas Afonsky, the artist half of the team behind Little Annie Rooney.

75
(1934)
1930s
hard times and good times
T
here was no Great Depression in the field of cartoon
advertising; the genre thrived in the 1930s.
Comic-strip artists, magazine cartoonists,
and illustrators found a lot of employment producing
advertising… fighting for the limited resources of a
penurious public. Comic-strip characters, previously used as
endorsers of products and services to a limited degree, flooded
cartoon ads. Paper personalities assured real-life readers of
product reliability, hidden benefits, and socially redeeming
applications. Cartoonists themselves became pitchmen,
increasingly visible in ads.
F. Opper, who been drawing political cartoons since the
1870s, produced an ad booklet for the Democratic National
Committee in 1932, ridiculing President Hoover. And the
newest of the new appeared in cartoon ads, too – Buck Rogers
“of the 25th Century,” too, persuading kids that certain
products were the wave of the future.
Manufacturers and ad agencies associated their products
with specific comics and characters. It was widely believed,
in the 1890s, that Kodak’s Brownie camera was inspired
by Palmer Cox’s characters, but no formal connections or
royalty arrangements existed. Similarly, Percy Crosby and
his heirs continually have argued that Skippy Peanut Butter
was a malicious violation of rights, agreements, expectations,
distinctive images, names, and trademarks. Skippy, as a
cartoon and comic strip, ran for approximately a dozen years;
the peanut butter has stuck to the roofs of the public’s mouth,
and in the Crosby estate’s craw, for three-quarters of a century.
But when amity reigned (in the form of ironclad contracts
for advertising, licensing, and merchandising) some comic-
strip characters became identified with their products.
Little Orphan Annie: Ovaltine. Red Ryder: Daisy Air Rifles.
Although they are both gone now, Postum cereal drink was
synonymous with its cartoon nemesis, Mr. Coffee Nerves.
And in the ’30s, the volume of cartoon ads – testifying
to their effectiveness – grew to such an extent that an
advertising agency, Johnstone and Cushing, was established
just to specialize in the genre.
 (1932)

Ludwig Bemelmans’ most famous creation was Madeleine, of children’s book fame. But she was still seven years in the future when his full-page ad for Jell-O appeared
in the Sunday funnies. Also a successful restaurateur and travel writer, Bemelmans drew and wrote for The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Travel, and other magazines.

78

top left One of the first cartoonists in our book was still active in 1932. F. Opper
advertised for the Democratic Party in 1932 by dumping on incumbent President
Herbert Hoover. His “’Erbie” series focused on the supposed Anglophilia of Hoover –
an odd issue in the midst of the Depression. James Thurber, hitting his stride in The
New Yorker in 1933, cartooned for The French Line of cruise ships top right.
(1932) (1933)
(1933)
bottom Billy the Vegetable Hater is a curious cartoon ad: Ovaltine placed commercials on the
popular Orphan Annie radio show, which led to a wildly successful issue of rings and Secret
Decoders (see page 5, 112 ), as well as mugs and shaker cups with Annie’s picture on them.
But when it came time to advertise in the Sunday funnies, Ovaltine hired a hack artist, not
Annie’s Harold Gray… and trafficked in her popularity with a tiny image on the small mug.
79
 (1933)

80

One of the great opportunities for cartoon ads
was to invite customers to “Take me out to
the ball game!” Every sandlot kid’s hero was
depicted – sometimes in photos, usually in
cartoons (even with a photographed face on a
cartoon body) – hawking all sorts of products,
making all sorts of claims.
Portfolio:
BASEBALL
It was generally conceded that baseball personalities like Babe Ruth and Dizzy
players whose off-field lifestyles sometimes Dean were virtual comic characters anyway
were less than commendable were eagerly to many fans (not that there’s anything wrong
trusted by customers when they endorsed with that).
cereals and cigarettes, limousines and
laxatives. No matter: they were American
heroes, and it helped that larger-than-life
(1927)
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(ca. 1940s)

(1934)

above Puppeteer, children’s book author, and animator Tony Sarg drew ads that appeared the original Life, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post. A true polymath, he also
designed toys and the famous mechanical Christmas windows at Macy’s during the 1930s.

right top The cover of a booklet – a storybook tale of Buck Rogers, with illustrations by the science-fiction strip’s cartoonist, Dick Calkins – that was issued by Kellogg’s as a
premium in 1933.

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(1937) (1938)

(ca. 1930s)

At the dawn of the Age of Comics, in 1896, R. F. Outcault designed more than a hundred buttons (celluloids or pinbacks) (ca. 1930s)
of the Yellow Kid, and a genre was born. Cartoon characters have advertised all sorts of things, including themselves
and their newspapers, on buttons. In the 1920s and ’30s newspapers created “comics clubs” with colorful pinbacks…
and created millions of young newspaper readers.

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(ca. 1930s)

(1935)

E. C. Segar had been drawing Thimble Theatre for a decade before he introduced a walk-on character, the sailor named Popeye. Almost overnight, Popeye inspired a myriad of products
and promotions, toys and games. For many years Popeye was the major licensing property of King Features Syndicate.

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C E L E B RI T I E S
Crowding the cartoonists and characters making the pitch. Or, in a bizarre juxtaposition point: cartoon ads helped persuade the public
in 1930s ads were celebrities of stage and that seems to be the worst of both worlds, many to suspend its skepticism… to overcome the
screen, sports and society. For companies and cartoon ads arranged fumetti-like pastiches dreaded “sales resistance.”
advertisers, this was seldom an “either/or” of photo-faces on cartoon-bodies. Sometimes
proposition; many ads with celebrities were the oddest matches were consummated
cartoon ads. between celebrities and products. Whether
A celebrity endorser was often pictured in actresses ever really did their own laundry,
a photo portrait, and featured in a comic strip or yachtsmen swilled beer, was beside the

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(1937)

(1943) (1937)

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 (1930)

this page Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Folks was a long-running cartoon panel, starring the Trolley, Mickey (Himself) McGuire,
the Powerful Katrinka, and the Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang. Fox’s genial style made him popular with ad agencies.

facing page Some ad exec figured that the public would add Camel cigarettes to their shopping lists when they saw them being
smoked by a mechanical robot that amazed children. The irony here is that robots at the Chicago World’s Fair (1934, the date
of this cartoon ad) did not smoke. But, perhaps inspired by this ad, Electro of the 1939 New York World’s Fair did indeed
“inhale and exhale” smoke.

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Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Theophrastus Seuss,
made his first mark in American letters with
nonsense cartoons and articles in the pages
of Judge and Life in the mid-1920s. A decade
later he wrote his first hybrid children’s book
for adults, And To Think That I Saw It on
Mulberry Street. Eventually, of course, Seuss
launched the Beginner’s Books line with his
Cat In the Hat; and his cartoon Who’s Zoo of
bizarre beasts is ubiquitous.
Less known is another ubiquity – Seuss
was not just a cartoonist, he was a very active
cartoon ad man. The long-running (1928-
1945) cartoon-ad campaign for Flit insecticide
made common a national catchphrase, “Quick,
Henry! The Flit!” In hundreds of cartoon
ads, daffy Seuss characters were threatened
by comic hordes of mosquitoes, their only
salvation being the trademark hand-operated
spray can.
Seuss was one of the most active of all
cartoonists who doubled as commercial
salesmen, beginning with entire cartoon
booklets hyping Marine Motor Oil to products
as disparate – and perhaps surprising to his
fans – as beer and air rifles.

(1934)

(ca. 1930s)

(1934)

(1934)

top left It probably was inevitable that Dr. Seuss would produce cartoon ads for a beer
company. Both his father and grandfather were brewmeisters in his hometown of Springfield,
Massachusetts. Except for Prohibition, Dr. Seuss might have followed in their footsteps
and never become a cartoonist. Seuss drew for Judge beginning in 1925; then Life and
College Humor, and finally, several million children’s books… along the way registering his (1934)
displeasure with the shuttering of the family trade.
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(1934)
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(1934) (1935)

From 1934 to 1935, Van Heusen Shirts leveraged the cartoon world for a series of ads featuring a dozen of the top cartoonists of the day. A faux letter from the cartoonists, reflecting
their style and personality, extolled the virtues of Van Heusen’s Arrow Shirts – “Sanforized,” a process introduced to the United States just a few years prior to this 1930 campaign.

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(1936)

facing page Charles Sykes, famous editorial cartoonist, depicted one of cartooning’s great icons enjoying a bowl of tomato soup, evidently finding gustatory
diversion from the rise of dictators and the global depression.

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Peter Arno achieved great fame in The New Yorker by depicting the sophisticated upper classes of New York, and their foibles. This endorsement of Rheingold,
a decidedly working-class beer favored by blue-collar workers in bars, drips in alcoholic irony.

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C A R T OONI S T S A S P I T C H M E N
The American cartoonist, who occasionally
had been treated (at least by the publicity mills
of publishers) as a celebrity – new limousines
and European cruises dutifully recorded in
gossip columns – joined their comic characters
as spokespersons. The public, evidently, was
eager to accept the proposition that because car-
toonists could make people laugh, they could be
trusted to recommend breakfast cereals, laxa-
tives, automobiles, and radios. In some areas,
such as endorsing beer and liquor brands, there
was a public perception that cartoonists spoke
from experience.

(1919)

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(1933) (1938)

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One of the worst-drawn strips in history, but arguably one of the best-written (at least for readers of its time) was Sidney Smith’s Gumps. It was the premier strip of
the Chicago Tribune, which was the premier newspaper of America’s heartland. And, via syndication, it was popular in cities and villages everywhere. This ad by the
Tribune about Smith’s record-breaking contract wallows in dollar signs, presumably to impress readers about Smith’s popularity and the Trib’s deep pockets. As a
signing bonus, Smith received a Rolls-Royce. In 1935, after signing another million-dollar contract, Smith celebrated too much in Chicago, drove his newest Rolls-
Royce into a tree on his way home to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and was killed.

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(ca. 1930s)

top left The title to this ad is also the title of one of H. T. Webster’s most popular panel-cartoon series (there was the appropriate counterpoint, “How To Torture Your Wife”).
Harold Tucker Webster’s popularity carried him to the cover of Time magazine in 1945.

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(1937)

above This would have been plagiarism, copying the format, style, characters,
and bird’s-eye-view of Right Around Home… except that it was Dudley Fisher
cloning himself for Hotpoint Refrigerators. His strip’s star, Myrtle, became a
blonde for the ad.

right top Frank Godwin, again, to the rescue, drawing elegant ads to make
ballroom dancer Arthur Murray plausible as a spokesman for acne-curative
Fleischmann’s Yeast.

right bottom Joy and Glooms, an old side-panel by cartoonist T. E. Powers,

was revived as an advertising vehicle, draw by Ben Batsford.
(1937)

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(1939)

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(1938)

bottom Wheateena Breakfast Cereal was advertised by the capable team of Dr. Matey and cartoonist Paul Fung. Slight touches – backgrounds, trees – betray the fact that
Fung at this time was ghosting the daily Polly and Her Pals.

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top “Rube Goldberg Inventions” might have worked only on

paper… but the concept itself worked very well for its creator
through the decades. A newspaper feature, books, even toys
– and now an annual competition for engineering students –
their popularity led to use in many cartoon ads. This is one of
a number of ads Goldberg did for Goodyear Tires in 1939. It
appeared in Time and other major magazines.

bottom left F. Opper might have spun in his grave when his
classic characters Alphonse and Gaston, overly polite
Frenchmen, were used after his death in ads complaining
about constipation. The campaign stopped short of “You go
first, my dear Alphonse…” “But I can’t!!!”

bottom right A long-running cartoon ad campaign employed

many cartoonists who drew portly characters learning how
much slimmer they would be if they would only eat Ry-Krisp.
George Lichty was an obvious choice for the trademark rotund
characters he drew in magazine cartoons and in his popular
newspaper panel Grin and Bear It.
(1939) (1939)

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(ca. 1930s)

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(ca. 1930s)

(ca. 1930s)

top The Johnstone and Cushing Agency issued periodic catalogs of their cartoonists’ work, for
the eyes of art directors of other account agencies, and for manufacturers themselves. This artist
is William Sakren, who showed – an important point – that he could provide the look of Gluyas
Williams or George Clark, on demand.

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J OHN S T ON E and C U S HING
Thomas Arthur Johnstone had long been aware
of the business potential of entertainment. In
the early 1920s, he had a chance meeting with
Chico Marx when the Marx Brothers’ careers
had seemed to hit bottom. Johnstone listened
as Marx explained the brothers’ plight, which
included no work and no money. He contacted
his older brother, Will, and the two hastily
assembled a show that combined old Marx
Brothers vaudeville routines, new material
written by Will, and new music composed by
Tom. The cobbled-together I’ll Say She Is!
opened in some smaller Pennsylvania venues
before opening in Philadelphia in June 1923. It
was an instant hit. A year later, the show made
Broadway, and the Marx Brothers suddenly
found themselves at the beginning of their
most successful years.
Johnstone learned that Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World was looking for a manager for
its syndication company, the Press Publishing
Co., and he won the job. During the 1920s,
the Chicago Art Institute alumnus began
working with the paper’s cartoonists every
day, and brother Will drew editorial cartoons
for the paper, popularizing the image of the
overburdened, barrel-clad taxpayer.
Born March 3, 1888, in Evanston, Illinois,
Johnstone became friendly with many of the
World’s cartoonists, but the association was
Portfolio:
by Tom Heintjes
cut short in 1930, when Joseph Pulitzer Jr. sold sections, having performed research that
the struggling paper to the Scripps-Howard corroborated Gallup’s. According to Stephen
organization. Scripps-Howard combined its Fox in his book Advertising the American
new acquisition with the Evening Telegram Dream, Hearst selected 1,000 subscribers
to form the World-Telegram, in the process from one of its papers and omitted the
putting many of the World employees,
including Tom Johnstone, out of work. But he
wasn’t idle for long – Johnstone would soon
have an idea.
Dr. George Gallup’s first research study,
released in 1931, analyzed the preferences of
newspaper readers in Des Moines, Iowa. His
report produced two startling conclusions
concerning the Sunday comics: The least
popular comic strip was better read than the
main news story, and adults as well as children
were avid readers of the Sunday comics section,
refuting the assumption that the Sunday comics Johnstone
section was largely the purview of young people.
Gallup’s revelation grabbed the attention of
advertisers, who saw an opportunity to put
their messages before a large and enthusiastic
audience, and he expanded his research to 14
newspapers and interviews with approximately
40,000 newspaper readers. His subsequent
studies showed that a popular comic strip had
the second-highest readership of anything in
the paper, behind the picture page.
The Hearst newspaper chain was among
the first to welcome advertisers to its comics
Cushing
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 main news section from a Sunday edition; 45
subscribers complained. On another Sunday
the paper failed to include the magazine
supplement, and 240 people complained. When
the paper withheld the comics section, 880
people registered their displeasure. Armed with
this information, Hearst’s Sunday funnies, the
Comic Weekly, began soliciting advertising.
Young & Rubicam, one of the era’s most
influential and respected ad agencies (which
enhanced its credibility by bringing Gallup
on staff in July 1932), grasped the appeal of
comic advertising and became the trailblazer
with its May 1931 Suburban Joe advertisement
for Grape-Nuts cereal. Also in 1931, Roy
Whittier created Little Alby to sell Grape-Nuts.
General Foods, the maker of Grape-Nuts,
reported a dramatic surge in the cereal’s sales,
which had been steadily declining for years.
The trickle of comic-strip advertising became
a flood, and by 1933, advertising in nationally
(ca. 1930s) syndicated Sunday comics sections cost more
than a page in such stalwart magazines as The
Saturday Evening Post.
Raymond Rubicam of Young & Rubicam
was one of the early champions of comics-
style advertising (or “sequence-picture copy,”
as he termed it). Rubicam’s chief advertising
experience was as a copywriter, and he saw
the narrative quality of the comic-strip form
as an effective marketing tool. Young &
Rubicam repeated the success of the Little Alby
campaign with another Grape-Nuts cartoon-
style campaign starring baseball pitcher Dizzy
Dean. The agency was also responsible for
Albert Dorne’s creation of the Mr. Coffee Nerves
campaign, which increased sales of the General
Foods coffee substitute, Postum. Success bred
imitation, and the cartoon ad was suddenly an
advertising staple.
Following his layoff from the World,
Johnstone encountered some lean times, as
many did during the Depression. “My father
bounced around for several years, just trying
to get by. He was hard pressed to find money
to pay the man who put a new roof on our
house,” said his son, also named Thomas
Arthur Johnstone. His father came home one
(ca. 1930s) day after having talked to someone about
the economic opportunities in cartoon ads,
and he saw the chance to capitalize on his
relationships with cartoonists.
In the early 1930s he founded the Thomas
A. Johnstone Comic-Art Studios and began
visiting all the major advertising agencies,
including J. Walter Thompson, N.W. Ayer,
and Young & Rubicam. “My father sold a few
of the agencies on the idea, and that was the
beginning for the company,” he said. The elder
Johnstone – whom his employees fondly called
“the Old Man” – groomed a stable of cartoonists
capable of producing a wide range of advertising
work. New York had long been the nexus of
the cartooning world; it was the cradle of the
newspaper strip, the magazine gag, and the
relatively new but fast-growing comic-book
industry. With the city’s monopoly on talent,
Johnstone could tap the industry’s best. By 1935,
Johnstone’s studio was producing work that
promoted Lux Soap, Chase & Sanborn Coffee,
Nestlé’s Chocolate, Shell Gasoline, Ivory Soap,
and Fleischmann’s Yeast, among others. Some
of the company’s campaigns won advertising
industry awards in 1935, conferring credibility
(ca. 1930s)

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on the company, and allowing it to accumulate
more accounts.
Building his new business did not dampen
Johnstone’s love of Broadway, and he
remained involved with the Great White Way.
In 1930, around the same time that the World
let him go, he was involved with a resurrected
production of Artists and Models, a show that
had been performed periodically on Broadway
since 1923. One of the investors in the show
was Samuel Dewey Cushing, and he and
Johnstone struck up a friendship.
Sam Cushing was the civil engineer who
invented the fuse for the tracer bullet, which
allowed American troops in World War I to aim
weaponry with greater accuracy; his innovation
was credited with expediting the Allied victory.
He also invented a semaphore system that was
adopted as the nationwide standard for the
railroad system (vestiges of the system endure
in today’s railroad network). These and other
patents he held generated a sizable personal
fortune, although much of it was lost by
unprofitable investments in European bonds.
Nevertheless, Cushing’s only son, John
Dewey Cushing, born March 19, 1908, had a
trust fund that afforded him an income, but
not one so large that he didn’t need to work.
Sam knew that Tom Johnstone was enjoying
some success with his art agency, so in 1936 he
suggested that his son Jack, as he was called,
see Johnstone about a job. Johnstone made
Jack a partner, and Johnstone and Cushing
was born.
Creig Flessel started drawing comic books in
1935, when he was 23. No one was getting rich
drawing comic books, so he sought to supplement
his income with advertising illustration. “In
1936, I went to J. Walter Thompson looking
for work, because they had been doing a lot of
comic ads,” he said. “All the secretaries there
knew Tom Johnstone, and one of them told me
I should go to Johnstone and Cushing.” Flessel
went to the Johnstone and Cushing offices,
then in the Commerce Building at 145 East
44th Street, and he took the elevator to the
thirty-sixth floor penthouse suite that housed
the offices. Flessel was in awe of the staff, which
was a cartooning Who’s Who: “There was
Albert Dorne, Austin Briggs, Bill Sakren, Joe
King, Stan Randall, Paul Fung, Milt Gross, Milt
Caniff, Noel Sickles,… everybody [eventually
including Lou Fine, Stan Drake, Ralston Jones,
Katie Osann] went through there at some point.
The talent level was just intimidating.”
The company was able to hire the best talent
because the advertising industy’s demand for
comics-style advertising was great, and the
agencies paid an art service like Johnstone and
Cushing accordingly. As the company assembled
a staff, they hired Jack Frost and Irving
Watanabe for balloon lettering, Floyd Bonar for
logo lettering and Eliot Batchelder for coloring
and mechanicals production.
“They had a lot of work and they needed
artists,” Flessel said, “but they felt my work
was a little crude, so they recommended me to
John Striebel.” Striebel needed an assistant to
help produce his Dixie Dugan strip, so he hired
Flessel. While there, he also assisted Streibel in
drawing advertisements featuring Vic and Sade,
characters from Paul Rhymer’s humorous radio
show who appeared in ads as avid consumers of
Farina Wheat cereal.
After a year with Striebel, Flessel again
knocked on Johnstone and Cushing’s door.
“They asked me what I had been doing recently,
and I told them about the Vic and Sade work,”
he said, so “Fless,” as he was known around the
office, went to work on the Nestlé Toll House
cookies and R.C. Cola accounts, beginning a
long relationship with the company. He created
many ads that featured recurring characters,
including Betty Bite-Size for General Foods,
the Trailer Twins for Raisin Bran and R.C.
and Quickie for R.C. Cola. “Advertisers liked
characters,” he said. “One day, the Nehi
Beverage Co. called up its advertising agency,
BBDO, and said they wanted a character for
the R.C. Cola ads, but nobody at the agency
knew what kind of character they wanted,”
Flessel said. “Earlier, we had put together a
presentation for a cereal account that didn’t go
anywhere, and we had the characters already
drawn up, so they became R.C. and Quickie for
R.C. Cola.”
Once an artist was selected to draw the ads
for an agency, he would almost always remain
on that account, because the agency and the
manufacturer wanted consistency in the ad
campaign. “There was a friendly competition
among the artists to get an account,” Flessel
said. “Getting an account meant that the
agency liked your work better than anyone
else’s, so that was exciting.” Flessel also said
that few Johnstone and Cushing artists signed
their work, concerned that being identified
with certain products would limit future
opportunities. “If you signed your name to
a Coca-Cola job and a Pepsi job came in, you
couldn’t do it.” So like many of his peers,
Flessel worked simultaneously on competing
accounts by altering the styles he used. “I
would occasionally put an initial on something,
especially the Eveready True Stories work, but
I never put my name on the R.C. Cola work.”
Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff, already
collaborating on the Scorchy Smith and Terry
and the Pirates strips, were two of several
creators – including Lou Fine and Albert
Dorne – who produced the Mr. Coffee Nerves
cartoon ads for General Foods. The Sunday-
page ads featured the wraithlike Mr. Coffee
Nerves, whose attempts to use caffeine to
disrupt people’s lives were always thwarted
through their consumption of Postum, the
caffeine-free coffee substitute. Flessel said
that Sickles chafed under the restrictions
of doing ad work. “He wanted to do his own
thing, but the art directors insisted they were
boss,” he said. “You had to bend a little.” Mr.
Coffee Nerves was one of several accounts that
originated outside Johnstone and Cushing but
which later settled there as the company’s
reputation grew.
Mr. Coffee Nerves is perhaps the prototypical
cartoon ad from the comics’ Golden Age.
All the legendary puzzle pieces were there:
talented cartoonists moonlighting; a major
corporation with a product whose success
was identified with the cartoon-ad campaign;
a character whose fame rivaled the product
itself; widespread publication in newspapers
and magazines. It did not hurt that the
campaign’s two great cartoonists, Caniff and
Sickles, already at the height of their prowess,
created their most impressive artwork for the
cartoon ads.
They had to. Their peers were watching… it
could lead to greater commissions… and it paid
better than syndicated comics at that time.
“Coffee nerves” turned to Wartime Jitters
as the Golden Age ended. The 1940s, a decade
that will live in an entirely different profile of
every aspect of American life, was reflected
in the work of Johnstone and Cushing, and
all cartoons ads across the board. J+C’s
story, as well as the chronicles of cartoons
and commerce, will continue in Volume II of
Drawing Power.
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M R . C O F F E E N E RV E S
Mr. Coffee Nerves is probably the most rep-
resentative, if not the most iconic, of cartoon
ad campaigns.
Some of the handsomest artwork in the
genre was produced for the product (particu-
larly by Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff, com-
bining their middles names as “Paul Arthur”);
but there were many quality cartoonists and
advertisers – as we see here – through the
years. It ran for many years, evidence of the
campaign’s effectiveness. But that was not a
Portfolio:
rare event with other products. Postum’s dippy
claims (not just that its breakfast drink lacked
caffeine but that its ingestion would lead to
health, wealth, and marriage) were no more
outlandish than other ads’ testimonials.
But in Mr. Coffee Nerves (himself a bizarre
anti-spokesman, a stereotyped melodramatic
presence in an otherwise realistic world) was
the perfect storm – all these factors coming
together in one campaign. Albert Dorne and
Lou Fine were among the other artists who de-
picted the doomed adventures of the caffeine-
soaked villain.
The first era of Cartoon Advertising
appropriately ends in the person of Mr.
Coffee Nerves – the summation of the artwork,
approach, environment, and naïve audacity of
cartoonists and ad agencies. With the 1940s
came a world war, and, decade by decade,
a growing sophistication (or cynicism, take
your pick) of the cartoon audience and the
American Consumer.
(ca. 1940s)
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Cartoonists
Alley, J.P. – 72 (bottom left)
Barton, Ralph – 36
Batsford, Ben – 111 (bottom)
Bemelmans, Ludwig – 78
Briggs, Clare – 42 (top), 43 (top)
Calkins, Dick – 84 (upper right)
Caniff, Milton – 120 (bottom),
122-124
Cooper, Fred G. – 101
Cox, Palmer – 21 (top)
Crosby, Percy – 110 (upper right,
bottom)
Davenport, Homer – 44
Dirks, Rudolph – 38
Disney, Walt – 57, 86, 94
Donahey, William – 61
Tad (Thomas A. Dorgan) – 38
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) – 96-99
Drayton, Grace – 9
Dwiggins, Clare Victor – 24, 46
(bottom middle)
Ehrhart, Samuel D. – 14
Fine, Lou – 121 (all)
Fish (Anne Septon) – 72 (right)
Fisher, Bud – 54, 71, 86
Fisher, Dudley – 111 (top)
Flagg, James Montgonery – 72
(upper left)
Fox, Fontaine – 92, 100
Fung, Paul – 113 (bottom)
Gellert, Hugo – 63
Gibson, Charles Dana – 39, 60
(left)
Godwin, Frank – 73 (upper left),
81, 111 (middle)
Goldberg, Rube – 114
Grant, Vernon – 11
Gray, Harold – 112
Gropper, William – 65 (bottom)
Gross, Milt – 60 (right)
Hatlo, Jimmy – 56
Held, John, Jr. – 48 (upper right),
52 (all), 68, 69
Herold, Don – 67 (lower left)
Herriman, George – 38, 57
Hoff, Syd (A. Redfield) – 57, 65
(upper left)
Hokinson, Helen – 101
Holman, Bill – 101
Johnson, Herbert – 67 (upper left)
Kemble, E.W. – 22 (left)
Keppler, Joseph – 16 (top, bottom
right), 18 (all), 20 (bottom)
King, Fay – 42 (lower left)
King, Frank – 9
Lichty, George – 57, 114
Mayer, Hy – 46 (top)
McCay, Winsor – 25, 40, 41, 47, 74
McCutcheon, John T. – 43 (bottom
left)
McManus, George – 6, 12, 38, 42
(lower right), 48 (upper left), 50,
58 (lower left)
Nast, Thomas – 16, 17
O’Neill, Rose – 38
Opper, Frederick Burr – 19, 22
(bottom right), 79 (upper left)
Outcault, Richard – 7, 26-35, 45, 70
Patterson, Russell – 48 (bottom
right), 101
Perelman, S.J. – 101
Posen, Al – 119
Rea, Gardner – 101
Robinson, W. Heath – 58 (lower
right)
Roth, Herb – 67 (upper right)
Sarg, Tony – 84 (left)
Scheel, Theodore – 65
(upper right)
Segar, E.C. – 86 (right), 87
Shults, A. B. – 20 (top)
Sickles, Noel – 120 (bottom), 122-
124
Smith, Sidney – 58 (top), 107
Soglow, Otto – 62, 73 (upper right)
Steig, William – 101
Swinnerton, Jimmy – 46 (bottom
left)
Sykes, Charles – 67 (bottom right),
103
Thurber, James – 79 (upper right)
Webb, Paul – 101
Webster, H.T. – 102 (upper left),
110 (upper left)
Willard, Frank – 8, 108
Williams, Gaar – 46 (bottom right)
Williams, Gluyas – 59, 66
Williams, J.R. – 55
Verbeek, Gustav – 23
Young, Art – 64
Zim (Eugene Zimmerman) – 43
(bottom right), 71
IND E X
Comic Characters Skeezix – 9 Fibber McGee and Molly – 90 Ingram’s Shaving Cream – 67, 119
and Strips Skippy – 110 Fisher, Bud – 71, 105, 109 Ipswich Hosiery – 60
Slim Jim – 8 Fisher, Ham – 108 J.C. Penney – 86
Abie the Agent – 53, 105 S’matter Pop? – 8 , 105 Flagg, James Montgomery – 106 Jas. McCreery & Co. – 59
Alphonse and Gaston – 114 Snap, Crackle and Pop – 11 Fox, Fontaine – 106, 108 Java Face Powder – 36
Andy Gump – 8, 58, 107 Snuffy Smith – 49 Goldberg, Rube – 105, 106 Jell-O – 38, 78
Barney Google – 53, 85, 86 So This Is Married Life – 53 Greenberg, Hank – 82 Jiggs Brand Corned Beef and
Blondie – 49 Sparkplug – 53 Hershfield, Harry – 105 Cabbage – 50
Boitram, Foidnand and Hoiman Spot – 10 Hoban, W.C. – 105 Johnson Wax – 90
– 53 Stumble Inn – 53 Hokinson, Helen – 101 Johnstone and Cushing – 116
Boob McNutt – 53 Sunshine – 53 Holman, Bill – 101 Kaufman and Strauss Publishers
Bringing Up Father – 8, 10, 12, Teenie Weenies – 61 Jones, Buck – 90 – 27
48-50, 53, 58, 85 Terry and the Pirates – 8 Keeler, Ruby – 116 Kellogg’s All-Bran – 114
Brownies – 21 Terry Lee – 8 Ketten, Maurice – 105 Kellogg’s Cereal – 84
Buck Rogers – 84 They’ll Do It Every Time – 56 King, Frank – 108 Knights of Columbus – 43
Bull of the Woods – 55 Tige – 30, 31, 33, 35 Langdon, Harry – 60 Libby’s Tomato Juice – 106
Bungle Family – 108 Tillie Jones – 13, 53 McCarthy, Charlie – 91 Liberty Bonds – 41, 42, 43
Buster Brown – 21, 30-33, 35, 86 Tillie the Toiler – 13, 53 McCay, Winsor – 47, 105 Liebig Extract of Beef – 14
Buttercup – 53, 86 Tim and Tom – 8 McManus, George – 105 Londonderry Spring Water – 21
Campbell Kids – 9 Tiny Tads – 23 McNamara, Tom – 105 Louis F. Dow Co. – 56
Caspar – 53, 85 Toonerville Trolley – 10, 92, 100, Mix, Tom – 89 Lux Soap – 90, 91, 116
Castor Oyl – 53 108 Oberon, Merle – 116 Mabton Bank – 34
The Captain – 8, 10, 13 Toots – 53, 85 Patterson, Russell – 101 Monarch Sweet Pickles – 61
Cinderella Suze – 53 Toots and Caspar – 53, 85 Payne, Charles M. – 105 Mutt Brand Oranges – 7
The Commodore – 8 Uncle Sam – 40, 43, 105 Perelman, S.J. – 101 Narragansett Beer – 97
Dagwood – 49 Uncle Willie – 8, 108 Rea, Gardner – 101 Nestlé’s Chocolate – 115, 116
Dick Tracy – 8 Uriah Stumble – 53 Rogers, Ginger – 90 Onwards School Supplies – 84
Dinty Moore – 12, 53 Walt Wallet – 8, 108 Ruth, Babe – 80, 81 Outcault Advertising Co. – 35
Donald Duck – 57 Whiffle Hen – 53 Semon, Lawrence – 105 Ovaltine – 79, 102, 112
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend – 47 Wimpy – 87 Smith, Sidney – 107 Ovington’s Gift Shop – 52
Eddie’s Friends – 53 Winnie Winkle – 71 Steig, William – 101 Oxydol Soap – 115
Ella Cinders – 53 Yellow Kid – 7, 26, 29, 45, 70 Sterrett, Cliff – 105 Palmo Sun Shade – 18
Elmer Tuggle – 8, 53 Stuart, Gloria – 91 Paramount Popeye Club – 86
Felix the Cat – 49 Entertainment Tilden, Bill – 88 Pepsodent Tooth Paste - 117
Flash Gordon – 49 Tuthill, Harry – 108 Pond’s Extract – 33
Flip – 105 Amos ’n’ Andy (radio program) Walters, Bucky – 83 Popsicle – 87
For Better Or Worse – 53 – 117 Webb, Paul – 101 Post Bran Flakes – 100
Foxy Grandpa – 21 Art Front Ball (event) – 65 Willard, Frank – 108 Post Toasties – 94-95
Freddy the Shiek – 53 Artists and Models (movie) – 48 Wortman, Denys – 108 Postum – 120-124
Gasoline Alley – 9, 108 Bringing Up Father (play) – 12 Young, Loretta – 91 Postum Cereal – 111
Gold Dust Twins – 22 Chicago World’s Fair/A Century of Radio’s Orphan Annie Society –
The Gumps – 8, 58, 107 Progress (event) – 93 Newspapers, Magazines, 112
Ham Gravy – 53 Corvettes In Action (movie) – 90 and syndicates Ralston Cereal – 89
Hambone – 72 The Cradle Will Rock (play) – 65 Rheingold Beer – 104
Hambone’s Meditations – 72 Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (song) Atlanta Georgian – 86 Rice Krispies – 11
Hans and Fritz – 8, 13, 38, 49, 53 – 47 Buffalo Courier-Express – 10 Rogers Peet Co. – 58
Happy Hooligan – 13, 22, 53 Fibber McGee and Molly (radio Chicago American – 87 Royal Gelatin – 90
Harold Teen – 8 program) – 90 Chicago Herald-American – 58 Rusco Brake Linings – 67
Henry – 49 Gee, But I’d Like To Make You Chicago Tribune – 107 RyKrisp – 114
Herbie – 8 Happy (song) – 48 Evening Ledger – 86 Sal Hepatica – 113
How to Torture Your Husband – Good-bye, Ma! Good-bye Pa! Good- Evening Telegraph – 86 Schierbaum’s Hardware – 29
102, 110 bye Mule! (song) – 46 King Features Syndicate – 53 Sears and Roebuck – 8
Ignatz – 53, 86 Good News (movie) – 48 Life Magazine – 39, 96 Shaw Barton Calendar and
Jerry On The Job – 53, 105 Guy Lombardo (radio program) New Masses – 62 Specialty Advertising - 55
Jiggs – 8, 10, 12, 48-50, 53, 58, – 110 New York American – 40 Slechow & Righter – 21
85, 105 Happy Hooligan (play) – 38 New York Evening Journal – 86 Sohmer Pianos – 19
Joe Palooka – 108 I Love To Read The Funnies New York Herald – 8 Standard Service Gas Station – 57
Junior Nebb – 10 (song) – 49 New York Sunday Journal – 7 Steinway Pianos – 16
Just Boy –8 Liberator Costume Ball (event) New York World – 28 Sunkist Junior Juice Extractor
Just Kids – 53 – 63 Philadelphia North American – 8 – 67
Katzenjammer Kids – 8, 10, 13, Little Orphan Annie (radio Sacramento Bee – 86 Sunoco Gas – 57
38, 49, 53 program) – 112 San Francisco Examiner – 86 Sunshine Biscuits – 58
Kayo – 8 Love For Sale (song) – 48 Seattle Post-Intelligence – 87 Timken Bearings – 68, 69
The Kelly Kids – 8 Lovie Joe (song) – 46 Thomas Nast’s Almanac – 16 Traveler’s Insurance – 16
Krazy Kat – 38, 53, 57, 86, 105 May Irwin’s Bully Song (song) – 44 United States Army – 40
Lillums – 8 Mme. Sylvia (radio program) – 89 Products and services United States Navy – 43
Little Jimmy – 53 New Masses Forum (event) – 64 Van Heusen Shirts – 101
Little Orphan Annie – 8, 10, 79, New Masses Costume Ball (event) Arthur Murray Dance Studio – 111 Vendome Tank Car Company – 55
112 – 65 Blue Seal Extract Co. – 57 Weber Pianos – 18
MacDougal, Clarence ‘Mac’ – 13, 53 The New Yorkers (play) – 48 Bromo Seltzer – 118 Wheatena - 113
Maggie – 8, 10, 48, 53, 85 The Newlyweds and Their Baby Buster Brown Shoes – 30, 31 Wheaties – 82, 83
Mama – 8, 10, 53 (play) – 6 Campbell’s Soup – 9, 103 Women’s Committtee of the
Marianne – 42 New York Hippodrome (revue) – 25 Celotex Insulation – 67 Council of National Defense – 39
Maw Perkins – 53 Ophelia Rag (song) – 46 Chase and Sanborn Coffee – 91 Wrigley’s Gum – 13, 85
Mickey Mouse – 57, 94, 95 Popeye (animated cartoon) – 86 Cheerioats – 90 Yellow Kid Ginger Wafers – 26, 29
Min Gump – 107 There’s A Dark Man Coming With Cheerios – 91 Y.W.C.A. – 42
Minnie Mouse – 86 A Bundle (song)– 46 Coca-Cola – 76, 92
Moon Mullins – 8, 108 They’ll Never Bring Up Father Till Conoco Gas – 84 Tobacco Products
Mopey Dick and The Duke – 108 They Tear Down Dinty Moore’s D.A. Mayer Hungarian Wines – 18
Mr. and Mrs. Tuggle – 8, 53 (song) – 48 Daisy Air Rifles – 4 Bud Fisher Cigars – 71
Mrs. Kwakk Wakk – 53 Tom Mix Straight Shooter De Luxe Ice Cream – 9 Camel Cigarettes – 73, 75, 83,
Mush Stebbins – 53 Program (radio program) – 89 Democratic National Committee 88, 93
Mutt and Jeff – 7, 54, 86, 105, 109 Tramp, Tramp, Tramp – (movie) – 79 Capadura Cigars – 20
The Nebbs – 10 – 60 DeSoto Automobiles – 106 Dr. Scott’s Electric Cigarettes – 20
The Newlyweds and Their Baby Whispers In The Dark (song) – 48 Drano – 102 Hambone’s Sweet Cigars – 72
– 6, 53 Yellow Kids On Parade (song) – 45 Electric Hose – 66 Hassan Cigarettes – 38
Nize Baby – 60 Ziegfeld Follies (revue) – 46 Esso Marine – 98, 99 High Admiral Cigarettes – 29
Olive Oyl – 53 87 E T, V and G Railroad – 17 Kentucky Club Tobacco – 73
Officer Pupp – 53 Hucksters Eversharp Pens – 106 Lucky Strike Cigarettes – 74
On Our Block – 53 Feen-a-mint Laxative – 80 Murad Cigarettes – 72
Owl Eye – 53 Amos ’n’ Andy – 117 Fletcher’s Castoria – 102 National Cigarette & Cigar Co.
Paw Perkins – 53 Arno, Peter – 104 Fleischmann’s Yeast – 111, 118 – 70
Pearl – 53 Benny, Jack – 48 Flit Insecticide – 97 Pall Mall Cigarettes – 72
Perry Winkle – 8 Briggs, Clare – 105 French Line Cruises – 79 Prince Albert Tobacco – 75
Pluto – 94 Brown, Joe ‘E.’ – 90 George J. Nicht Seed and Feed – 58 Tokio Cigarettes – 38
Polly and Her Pals – 53, 105 Carter, Robert – 105 Gold Dust Washing Powder – 22 Tuxedo Tobacco – 105
Pop – 8 Coffman, Hal – 105 Goodrich Tires – 109, 114 Uncle Jake’s Nickel Seegar – 71
Popeye – 49, 85-87 Cooper, F.G. – 101 Goodyear Tires – 52 Union Leader Tobacco – 108
Rosie – 53 Crosby, Percy – 106 Grape-Nuts – 82, 90, 118 Winnie Winkle Cigars – 71
Rosie’s Beau – 53 Dean, Dizzy – 82 Gulfsteel Nails – 57 Yellow Kid Cigars – 70
Red Ryder – 4 DiMaggio, Joe – 83 Hotel St. Malo, Paris – 29
Rudy the Ostrich – 53 Devine, Andy – 90 Hotpoint Refrigerators – 111
Sandy – 8, 10, 79, 112 Dorgan, T.A., (Tad) – 105 Household Shoes – 34
Sappo – 53 Durante, Jimmy – 49, 90 IGA Rolled Oats – 87
 A C K NO W L E DG M E N T S
The editors would like to thank Mark Newgarden, Ron Goulart, Tom Heintjes, Richard Samuel West, Mark Wheatley,
Jon Barli, Sara Duke, John Knott, Richard Kelly, Elizabeth Alberding, Ted Marschall, Emily and Norman McCorkell,
Heather and Patrick Shaw, Ted Hake, Alex Winter, Deak Stagemyer, Terence Kean and Ed Nawton for their contribu-
tions, and assistance, to the book.

C r e d i ts
Hake’s Americana & Collectibles – p. 2, 7 (top), 8 (bottom),
9 (bottom), 29 (bottom left & right), 38 (all pinbacks, lower
right), 45, 58 (upper right & left, bottom left), 70 (middle
& bottom), 71 (bottom left), 86 (all), 87 (upper left & right,
bottom), 112 (all)
The Mark Newgarden Collection – p. 7 (bottom), 8 (top), 71
(bottom right), 72 (bottom left), 115 (all), 116 (bottom left),
117, 118 (all), 119
Mark Wheatley – p. 102 (upper left)

Kelly Collection of American Illustration – p. 61, 66, 67 Richard Samuel West – p. 16 (top, bottom right), 17, 18
(all), 97 (bottom left, right all), 101 (all) (bottom), 20 (bottom)

Prints and Photographs Division of The Library of Congress All other images are from the collections of Rick Marschall
– p. 40, 41, 42 (top), 43 (upper left) and Warren Bernard.

A B O U T T H E A U T HOR S
Rick Marschall has written or edited 65 books, mostly in the field of American popular culture. A former politi-
cal cartoonist, he has been an editor at three comic-strip syndicates and at Marvel Comics. A script writer for Disney
Comics, Marschall also launched the magazines Nemo, The Classic Comics Library and, with Tom Heintjes, Hogan's
Alley. His vintage-comics reprint projects have won awards in the US, France, Germany, and Italy. Marschall has
spoken overseas on behalf of the US Information Service of the State Department, and in 1995 he was consultant to
the US Postal Service for the 20-stamp commemorative series, American Comic Classics. He established Rosebud Ar-
chives, specializing in reclaiming vintage American graphic art in various media, with Jon Barli. The Marschall Books
imprint, of which Drawing Power is the first release, was announced by Fantagraphics Books in 2010. Lately Marschall
has been active in the Christian field, producing a weekly blog, Monday Morning Music Ministry, and writing a biogra-
phy of Johann Sebastian Bach for Thomas Nelson Publishers (2011). He currently is writing a biography of Theodore
Roosevelt illustrated by vintage cartoons. www.RickMarschallArts.com

Warren Bernard edited and organized the DVD of over 14,000 cartoons that accompanied the book Herblock:
The Life and Works of the Great Political Cartoonist. He wrote the first in-depth biographical article on the influential
cartoonist/journalist John T. McCutcheon, which was published in The Comics Journal #301. Warren has contributed
historical material and research to over a dozen books on comic and cartoon history, as well as lending items from his
collection to a number of museum exhibitions. As a volunteer in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library
of Congress, he has catalogued and provided historical background to over 1000 political cartoons from their holdings.
Warren is also the Executive Director of the Small Press Expo.

above Advertising is the most ephemeral of artwork... except perhaps opposite A Superman ad from Open Road for Boys (1940) magazine.
for cartoon ads featured on outdoor display, as on newspaper vending
machines, braving rain and snow. But today, cartoon advertising, like the Volume II of Drawing Power will open with wartime cartoon ads and
1924 Milwaukee Journal placard above, approaches museum status. superhero and animation characters.

A note on the cartoons in Drawing Power:

Any of the illustrations in this book, as well as additional art, can be purchased as prints, posters, framed or frame-
ready art; or in other formats like stationery or apparel. For information inquire at www.RosebudArchives.com