Mort Walker never did a lot of ads. Actually, while he claims to have been one of the best selling cartoonists of his generation in the late forties and early fifties, he was also one of the few who didn't do advertising. It wasn't until Beetle Bailey brought him fame (and a stable of assistants) that he could take on a client every now and then. One of the larger accounts he had, was a series of ads he did for the Cocal Cola Company to promote their product Sprite. The weekly series ran in the second half of 1969. When I thought I had found all of them, I came across another run, which used some of the same illustrations on another date, so the who what and where of them might be wrong. Visually they seem to have been based on the funny animals Mort Walker drew for BOner's Ark, which he had started in 1968 under his pen name Addison. In later years, Fred Johnson took over the art, but in the early years (and in this art series, it seems) the art was by Walker himself. And very pretty it was, too.
1 comment:
Imagine!
Mort Walker doing a series of ads for Coca-Cola (more exactly one of its products: Sprite)!
And nowadays, Coca-Cola is one of the official sponsors from the FIFA Confederations Cup (which's being held in Russia).
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