I Am Not an Artist

I wrote earlier about me spending hours a few nights ago looking through some old baseball cards and subsequently relishing those uber cool cartoons that once inhabited the backs of many of the older cards.

One I found particularly fun was the 'toon on the back of my 1958 Topps card Pee Wee Reese.

I began to do a little research when I found a Jim Caple ESPN.com column on the cartoon topic from last summer. Caple's column is a great read, and it contains a handful of card-toons about modern-day players fabricated by ESPN illustrators.

Caple mentions a few of the artists by name and provides a few details about their work and pay and such, but I'd like to do a little more research on some of those artists. And I'd really like to know who drew the cartoons for the 1958 Topps set. So if anyone knows, send me a note.

I tend to think it would be great fun to be an artist who developed some of those 'toons, but after reading Caple's article you learn that perhaps there wasn’t a lot of fun involved.

Still, I'm fascinated by the process and the product.

Now, I'm no artist, as you can see below, but I wanted to sit down and quickly sketch a card cartoon. I had to come up with a quirky idea, and all I could think of at the time was the stories of Hideki Matsui's massive pornography collection. Yeah, that was the best I could do.

Anyway, here's the result of my quick work. Please, all you serious artists out there, don't think I'm trying to pass this off with any hint of seriousness.