Bill Peckmann &Comic Art &Disney 09 Jul 2010 07:00 am
Give-aways
March 1947 (Walt Kelly?) cover with “Barks” on the box.
- Imagine you’re a kid and while reading your comic book you hit on a page offering some freebees that you have to mail away for.
Back cover
(Click any image to enlarge.)
So you mail for your subscription to get the goodies, and eventually the envelope shows up at your door.
You slowly and excitedly remove the contents. Your great and brilliant gifts unfold:
1
Dell recycled their covers to subscribers as a gift. (Suitable for framing.)
I was very fortunate that my older brother choose WD’S C & S as the one
comic book subscription we were allowed for the year.
He was a huge Carl Barks fan before I could even read.
2
I believe these first 2 are Kelly, the rest, 6 aren’t
3
Sleeping bag and hat look Kellyish?
4
5
6
And here’s a post script from Joakim Gunnarsson:
Bill, what a nice set of subscription posters ya got!
Have seen some of them before but not all I think.
You are right about Kelly doing some of these, but I’m not 100% sure wich he did and which Dan Noonan did.
I’d say the ones with Dopey are Kelly for sure!
The original art to the one where they are playing instruments has survived, BTW.
Joakim.
on 09 Jul 2010 at 8:10 am 1.Pierre said …
What a wonderful, if unexpected post. The artwork is certainly wonderful, with each poster telling an entire gag in one panel.
I loved the whole idea of premiums that were given away with subscriptions or other means such as box tops.
For instance, I have a set of M&M/Mars Star Trek: The Motion Picture paper models that are still un-punched and more importantly, in their original envelope. These models could be acquired by redeeming candy wrappers. I guess in the age of the internet, these kinds of incentives no longer have the draw they once did, but these premiums are still quite magical to me.
on 09 Jul 2010 at 9:17 am 2.Michael Barrier said …
A lovely nostalgic post, especially for those of us old enough to have been reading Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories in the late 1940s. That March 1947 cover is not by Kelly, though, but by Carl Buettner, the art editor in Western Printing & Lithographing Co.’s L.A. office at the time (it was he who added the “Barks jiffy chicken dinner” inside joke to the crate, a double joke since it referred to Barks’s chicken farm, too.) Most of the other covers transformed into pin-ups were drawn by Buettner, too, I believe, although the one with Doc and Dopey looks like Kelly.
Kelly definitely did draw what I think is the most wonderful WDC&S subscription premium, a 10 x 14 (I think, without taking my framed copy down from the wall to measure it) sheet called “The Disney Gang at the Circus,” which shows about 30 Disney characters under the big top, doing all sorts of funny Kelly stuff.
on 10 Jul 2010 at 12:55 pm 3.Eric Noble said …
I love these. I may have one of the Kelly covers for a Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories book I have. I will have to post it so somebody can make sure. Thank you for sharing these Mr. Sporn.