For many years, famous cartoonists also drew original cartoons for advertising a wide variety of products such as alcohol, razor blades, tobacco... the list goes on. My guess is that there are thousands of these uncollected anywhere. The heyday of this was the 1930s through the 1970s but it continued into the 80s and occasionally in the pages of the New Yorker at least into 2000s.
It would be very interesting to do some statistical studies to see how the amount of cartoons that were sold as cartoons versus those who are published as ads compares for various cartoonists in various publications. Collections of them would also be a long-term interest to the cartoonist field I think. Michael Maslin and Warren Bernard have both dipped their toes into this, but I do not know of any scholarly publication on this type of cartooning.
While I'm mostly thinking about magazines publishing these advertising cartoons, or newspapers, I'm sure there are other places as well. Recently I've seen Charles Saxon and other New Yorker cartoonists on whiskey coasters. Were these done on contract for the company? Or did they repurpose existing cartoons?
Research on gag cartoons has gone out of fashion, if it ever was in, but gag or magazine or pocket cartooning led to a very good living for decades.
I am sure it's never been as popular as any other type of comics research, which means that there is a lot of room for people to look into various topics and stake a claim for themselves outside of superhero or graphic novel research.
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