The Ephemerist

Here’s two recent examples of the Smurf craze that’s sweeping across Europe (or, two examples of attempts to artificially create one). Above is a key chain that was handed out to visitors of the Schleich booth at the 2008 Nürnberg Spielwarenmesse. It’s one of a special series of figurines produced to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the little blue dwarves.

In the mean time, Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn tries to cash in as well, by awarding customers with a little plastic Smurf for every € 15 purchase. These figurines are smaller than the regular Schleich ones, but apart from that, they are quite good, actually.

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In 1966, a Batman chapter cost you $ 5.49, which would amount to $ 35.73 today. And you didn’t even get Adam West or colorful Pop’s and Zowie’s for that…

(a Mophead scan from “On The Scene Presents : The Super Heroes”, provided by Van, with thanks to Darci for the calculation)

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Two legends of Belgian comics united in one photo - what are the odds of that. Inspired by the revolving Star sign on the Mercedes-Benz headquarters building (read more about that here), the Tintin sign has graced the Lombard building in Brussels for decades. The literally blown-up Plunk was last seen in Angoulème, Turnhout and loads of other gatherings of the comics tribes…

(from PlunkBlog)

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“The Tinker”, by Eddie Campbell (from The Fate of the Artist)

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Nice newspaper ad from 1945 (via Vintage Ads)

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Two nice examples of cartoon art in advertising by Hajo Müller (Germany, top); Andy Yang (Singapore, middle) and Maria Battle (Chili, bottom). Large-size scans, and loads of different versions, can be found at Ads of The World.

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From Jeff Heerman’s collection of paper ephemera.

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This is a quite old comic strip from the British weekly The Big Budget (from 1897). More info on that publication can be found here and here. It may be a bit hard to read, but the art is lovely.

(Thanks, Lyle)

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On the tickets for Flemish local public transport organisation De Lijn’s services (the bus, basically), Ilah’s Cordelia urges users to get their tickets in advance (as that is cheaper). Which is a bit strange to me, since this results in everybody at least once paying too much, namely for the ticket on which they find Cordelia’s good advice…

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From Batman #1.

(Thanks, Dave)

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