One more series of late 1800's postcards for you today, and while these are technically postcards, they are actually also a series of six advertisements for Fastidio Cigars, which was apparently a popular smoke from Havana back in the day. Now the difference between this set of postcards and the previous sets I've posted this month is that these tell more than just a romantic story-- these spell out how a series of blundering mishaps can do no harm to the mental well-being of a Fastidio cigar smoker. Let me see if I can properly narrate the action as played out below:
1.) During a lovely, but lengthy long walk through the forest, we find our cute couple resting for a spell. Our anxious young man finds this to be the appropriate time (on bended knee) to plead his undying love and intentions for our seated (on a dirty old log) damsel in distraction.
2.) After receiving the rather obvious cold shoulder, our couple stands back up to continue their now longer, awkward journey back upon the lakeside path, when "hello!" our handsomely frazzled fellow spots a bit of dirty old log schmutz on the young lady's dress!
3.) Not a problem. We're by the lake after all, and a dab or two of water will surely remedy the--
4.) Ooops!
5.) "Now look what you've done, you foozler!" she screams, after having clearly pulled him into the water with her.
6.) Giving her a moment to cool off, as well as dry-out, I'm assuming our hapless hero is taking a moment behind the bushes to either smoke a Fastidio, or maybe he's peeking through said bushes at her and etc etc... because it totally was her fault, after all.
Four of the postcard backs do a bit more Fastidio advert razzle-dazzle, while the other two have the traditional style postcard mailer backs. A fun series for sure, and I still can't believe I found all of them as they were scattered throughout hundreds of other various postcards in 4 different boxes.
4 comments:
Why do all of these feel like they are just a couple bad decisions away from criminal acts?
I really like the pastels ... it gives everything this weird glowing color, and the water dripping card shows a good deal of skill.
And yet nobody smoked anywhere in this!
The images are so processed that I have lost most any inkling of how they were created. The characters have a flat-footed heft that indicates they are photographically sourced, but were they well-rendered with a conte pencil or just ground down by generations, copy after copy, and then overlaid with watercolors? And the background! I feel like that is hand drawn mostly, but who knows? There is definitely a weird warp from image to image that reminds me of the surreality of AI art: The way tree limbs have missing middles and ground turns into water and the like. I mean, I know these aren't AI, but this shares the same sort of strange, aesthetic mutability with the mistakes machine learning.
I love the oops panel of course. And the dripping image Brian refers to. Just those two cards make a good enough story all on their own.
"Now look what you've done, you foozler!"
Gosh darn.
Noun
foozler (plural foozlers)
One who bungles; a maker of mistakes.
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