Here we continue our sampling of material from Cartoonist PROfiles, the long-running “unique quarterly magazine for the professional, the cartoon buff, the student, and all who enjoy cartoons.” Of course, many of these examples from PROfiles came our way via two dozen issues of the magazine sent to us by that Friend of LOAC, Bill Chadbourne.
As with most periodicals of its era, PROfiles made a significant piece of its revenue by turning over a portion of the page-count in each issue to advertisers. Unlike the X-Ray Specs or Sea Monkeys ads that adorned the newsprint pages of 1970s comic books, PROfiles ads showcased products or opportunities targeting its very specific audience. Some of the advertisers seemed obvious, such as the major newspaper syndicates that offered their subscriber newspapers a diverse portfolio of comic strips (click images throughout for an isolated view):
Others were touting more esoteric projects, both high-profile (the California ice arena built by Sparky Schulz) and low-profile (the sardonic Nixon poster, from 1971, during “Tricky Dick’s” first term as President). And did you know Chrysler used to produce a free, annual “Illustrator’s Kit”? It must have been an invaluable aid to cartoonists wanting automobile and truck reference images — and if that meant a lot of Chryslers appeared in comic strip stories, well, that’s what we call “win-win,” right?
Some early comics-focused books were advertised in PROfiles‘s pages —
— And schools that taught cartooning, either in a classroom setting or as a correspondence course –were also eager to place their ads in the PROfiles pages — as were, you’ll notice, the San Diego Comic-Con in the Orwellian year of 1984, as well as retailer-supreme Bud Plant:
Here’s a reminder that Bill Chadbourne has provided us with a wide-ranging array of comic strip-related books and magazines, photographs, and artwork. To see what else we’ve brought forth from that treasure trove, be sure to visit our previous installments in this series: # 1, # 2, # 3, # 4, # 5, # 6, # 7, # 8, # 9, # 10, # 11 # 12, and lucky # 13.
