One day late this week…. my apologies. Quick 15 minute or so study of singer Taylor Swift.

Yesterday’s nostalgic post about kid’s breakfast cereals, and some of the comments, got me thinking about how influential the art on cereal boxes have been over the years in the world of cartooning. I did a quick internet search looking for a book on the subject, but it appears there is none. There is an out of print 1995 book called Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford, but I have no idea if it’s centralized on the cartoon character angle.  Somebody needs to do a “The Art of the Cereal Box” coffee table book. I suppose there might be a few trademark issues there, but you would figure “fair use” would cover a book about the history of cereal box mascots and characters. The creation of cartoon characters as advertising campaigns was and is serious business, worthy of an episode of “Mad Men”.

Animator Jay Ward and Bill Scott, of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” fame, not only designed the characters for “Cap’n Crunch”, “Quisp” and ‘Quake” cereals for Quaker Oats, but they produced a whole series of animated commercials for their advertising campaign. You can probably trace the beginning of cartoon characters on cereal boxes to the advent of television and, more specifically, the advent of Saturday morning kid’s programming. The folks at Quaker were no dummies… they went right to the source of some of the most popular cartoons and had their ad campaigns created in that same style. It must have been hard to tell the difference between the shows and the ads. It’s arguable that Cap’n Crunch is as strong a legacy for Ward as his other animated characters. BTW, legendary cartoon voice actors Daws Butler and June Foray did a lot of the voice work on the Cap’n Crunch ads.

There were a lot of additional characters that were originally part of the Cap’N Crunch cast. Anybody remember…

Jean LaFoote (Cinnamon Crunch):

Smedley the Elephant (Peanut Butter Crunch):

Crunchberry Beast (Crunchberries):

The “Monster Cereals” from General Mills were another campaign that really insinuated itself into pop culture. These characters were developed by General Mills through various illustrators and so the credits for “designing” them are unclear. I met a cartoonist/Illustrator named George Karn when an art student here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul who claimed to have been the original creator of the Trix Rabbit and Count Chocula, but I have never been able to independently confirm that. Lots of Twin Cities illustrators worked for General Mills, which is based here.

Everybody is familiar with Count Chocula, Frankenberry and Booberry:

But does anyone remember these two brief “Monster Cereals”?:

I don’t think ‘Yummy Mummy” was ever an “Official” monster cereal, the character was distinctly different from the others, but it was around for a short time.

The list goes on: Tony the Tiger, Snap, Crackle and Pop, Toucan Sam, The Cocoa Puffs Bird, Lucky the Leprechaun, licensed properties like the Flintstones… Cereal mascot characters have a part in cartooning history, that’s for sure. Somebody should do a book. In the meantime here’s a fun link I found on the many different cereal box characters: Topher’s Breakfast Cereal Character Guide. Enjoy the trip down memory lane.

This link on Mark Evanier‘s excellent blog about the most terrible (or awesome) breakfast cereals got me thinking about the oddity that is the American breakfast cereal.

First, the fact that 95% of all breakfast cereals are about as far from what anyone would consider a good thing to eat for breakfast as it’s possible to be. I know there are plenty of breakfast cereals that really ARE good for you… high in fiber and with natural vitamins and minerals… but as a kid I hated that crap. I wanted the sugary stuff, man! The kind of cereals I liked probably had less nutritional value that a candy bar, but according to the ads they were “part of a healthy, balanced breakfast.” It was good to be ignorant.

This might have been my favorite cereal of all time as a kid:

Zero nutritional value. Low fiber. High sugar. No natural vitamins or minerals to speak of. Supposedly made from “corn”. Huh? These were sugary, styrofoam-like crunchy puffs… where was the corn? I could never figure out how they made these things. Were they fried? Baked? Spontaneously formed from solidifying frothy chemical goo? Dunno, but they were tasty and my parents actually required me to eat a bowl before school every day. Suckers!

Here’s my second favorite cereal of all time:

Obviously I had a taste for crunchy, golden colored bits of… uh… cereal.

I am still not sure if the pieces of cereal were supposed to be a kind of crown, or what. They looked like gears to me. There are lots of different versions of the box on the interwebby but this is the one I remembered most as a kid. I thought this guy was kind of creepy… staring back at me over my cereal bowl. I also thought this was one of the more blatantly false-advertised cereals, as I doubted there was much in the way of vitamins in there anywhere. No doubt some lab-created ones were dumped into the goo before it was… baked? Fried?

Breakfast cereals are more of a common bit of kid-nostalgia than most anything else I can think of. You remember the ones you loved… the boxes especially. They either disappear or evolve as time goes on, becoming a snapshot from your past. TV shows, comics, cartoons, etc. get recycled and replayed, but only a kid growing up the the 1970′s would remember that King Vitamin box. Brings you back.

Actually, when I think about it, even the super-sweet breakfast cereals were healthier when I was a kid than they are today. At least they used real, honest to good sugar back then. Now, it’s the horrific “high fructose corn syrup”. Ugh.

Well… back to work.

EDIT- Cartoonist Paul Trap writes to remind me that the “Quisp” alien was designed by “Rocky and Bullwinkle” animation legend Jay Ward. I actually knew that, but for some odd reason didn’t mention it in my post. Ward also did the “Cap’n Crunch” characters and the lesser know “Quake” cereal mascot for Quaker.

Q: I see whenever you mention working digitally, you cite “PhotoShop” as the software you use. Why PhotoShop? Painter seems to be more of an artist-orientated program with a lot more choices for emulating natural media. Why don’t you use Painter?

A: I have also heard that Painter, and least compared to previous versions of PhotoShop, was a much more artistically versatile program. I dabbled in it once and found there was a dizzying number of choices as to drawing and painting media, paper and canvas textures and ways to mimic natural media down to applying watercolor “wet” and then “drying” the watercolor whenever you wished before moving on. Amazing stuff… but for me it was overkill.

I taught myself how to color and paint in PhotoShop, and so that program is the easiest and fastest for me to accomplish what I want to accomplish. I don’t use many filters or tricks, but really just paint using the opacity and size control of a pressure sensitive pen and table (actually the Wacom Cintiq) to get the look I want. Probably there are a lot of easier ways to accomplish the same look, but it works for me. Therefore, I go by the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

No doubt if I had taught myself on Painter I’d be using Painter and not PhotoShop, but I didn’t. Painter offered too many choices and the learning curve was too steep compared to the relative simplicity of PhotoShop, so I went that route.

It looks to me that PhotoShop is closing the gap with respect to natural media emulation. I have CS5 but find myself still working in CS4 because some of the new features are a pain.

Thanks to Terry J. for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

I’m currently working on the last parts of my book on drawing caricatures and a new episode segment for “MAD” on the Cartoon Network, which is all keeping me pretty busy. I should be able to share work from MAD #509, a few magazine jobs including a cover illustration and some other goodies this month.

In the meantime, here is my latest workplace poster job for The Marlin Company:

The pencil sketch

The final artwork