Merry Christmas?

I raise a cup of cheer to all on the Holidays.

Santa on a Rocket

There is no more personal image for Christmas to me than Santa on a rocket. As a child of the 50's and 60's the promise of technology and the cold war were on every one's mind. Here is a link to an interesting collection of old holiday cards from the Soviet Union. Remember, Santa is watching. Have a very cool yule!

Bobby's Christmas Dream

Barnacle Press is a great site to spend some time reading old comic strips. Many of them are strips you may never have heard of. It is interesting to look at these strips from a time before the watering down of political correctness and approval by committee process has given us mostly milk toast for comic strips. Check out the entire run of Bobby's Christmas Dream. I wonder which reindeer's was slacking off to get it's head mounted on Santa's desk?

Magic Santa

Over at Pappy's Golden Age Comic Blogzine there is a new post of a scanned Santa story from Santa Clause Funnies, 1943. If you want to see the entire issue, follow the link provided at Scott Saavedrad's Comic Book Heaven.

Something that I found interesting in the book was that the lettering was done in upper and lower case. The usual form in hand lettered comic books and newspaper strips is to use all capital letters. Legibility is one main reason for this. The smaller lower case letters might tend to fill in because of the cheap paper and printing processes used in early comics and newspapers. The descenders, like a y,g or p, would also tend to be more difficult to allow room for when hand lettering. It is easier and faster, to cram only upper case letters into the word balloons.