Mirro-Krome Card. H.S. Crocker Co., San Francisco.
On a recent day-trip to Cape Girardeau, I enjoyed perusing vintage post cards in one of the many antique malls downtown. I like gathering cartoon post cards because they offer interesting source material for line-work techniques. I also like them because they offer hints at differing fashions, technologies, and both shifting and universal humor. To the best of my abilities, I locate these cards as circa 1940s. I dig the camping equipment! And the humor is much more risque than my grandmother ever led me to believe was popular in the 1940s. None of these cards were actually mailed, though. I wonder if they were more often collected than sent, an underground amusement.
My digital work has led me recently back into mail art. I am making my own post cards now to send to friends who, in turn, send me little capsules of their own work. Fun to imagine what might become of those as the minutia and ephemera of our day find their way into someone's packrat house and eventually an estate sale and flea market. Years from now, what sense will collectors make of our sense of aesthetics and humor, our taken-for-granted technologies of exchange? Hard to know, but fun to speculate.
Plastichrome. Coulourpicture Publishers, Inc., Boston.
Kromekolor Comic Card. Noble, Colorado Springs.
Plastichrome. Colourpicture Publishers, Inc. Boston.
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When I move out of a house or apartment, I like to hide cartoons someplace inconspicuous: under carpets,in the attic or basement, behind walls and pipes ,etc., like little time capsules.
ReplyDeleteHa! Very cool, Zen. At work, we have a cartoon bandit who leaves Post-it note cartoons on office doors and in more inconspicuous places. Is it me? I'll never tell...
ReplyDelete;-)