1958 Will Eisner “Spaceman Discovers Christmas” Comic – Cover

Spaceman Discovers Christmas Comic Cover

Yep, the holidays are coming and every year I try to come up with something really cool to feature all December.

Last year it was those great King Features “Popular Comics” greeting cards from 1951. This year it’s the 1958 comic book “Spaceman Discovers Christmas”!

Distributed by Ben Franklin Stores (and possibly other retailers). Rather than pages of product promotion, the complete comic is the story of a space alien named J.B. Grook who lands in his flying saucer and is escourted around town learning about what Christmas is all about (not a religious comic, rather giving to others, etc.). Produced by Will Eisner’s commercial studio, Promotional Publications, with art by and/or supervised by Eisner, creator of the Spirit.

Will Eisner! Woo-hoo!

I’ll put up a new page each weekday in December, and put them all up on Flickr after the holidays.

Enjoy!

Graph Cartoon Character Performance

So this morning I was checking in on my blog to make sure that everything was posting OK when I noticed this:

graph cartoons

It’s kind of hard to see, but the large cartoon shows a downward trending sales graph, and the smaller daily cartoon shows an upward trending sales graph. In the large cartoon a bald man is presenting, while in the smaller cartoon, a squiggly haired man presents.

Seeing the two cartoons together got me thinking; which character in my sales graph cartoons actually performed the best according to the data he or she was presenting.

So I took my 112 sales graph cartoons and created a spreadsheet. Every time the character presenting was giving good news they got a 1. Every time they were giving bad news they got a -1. And if the news was neither, a 0.

Here are the results as (what else?!) a graph:

  

Graph of graph cartoons.

Turns out if I assume that the person giving the presentation is responsible for the data presented, my characters are not gifted businesspeople.

The Squiggle-haired Man is probably the character most associated with my style, and he’s apparently a poor businessman indeed. After giving just under a third of all presentations, he scored by far the worst.

When you consider the Bald Man presented the most often and only ended up with a negative three for his performance, he did well for his peers.

The Blonde Woman presented less often and tied the Bald Man for performance. She’s one to watch.

The Brunette Woman presented only three times, so her negative one doesn’t really tell us much.

The Other presenters included a bee, a cow, a leprechaun, Frankenstein, a bird, a baby, and Robin Hood. Not bad as a group when you consider they’re either extremely young, fictional, or anthropomorphic.

So there it is. It’s disappointing, but I guess it’s better to know.

The good news is that cartoons about bad sales tend to sell well. So I guess I’ll keep ’em all around.