The Ghosts of Christmas Presents Past

I know what you’re thinking, “Bo Nanas appeared in less newspapers than the total fingers and toes on your average human* – how the heck did it end up on any merchandise?” The answer is very simple. The items above are fakes.

Well, they are real – just not mass produced for the general public. I made these especially as holiday presents for my clients. How this process would usually work is that I would go into a dollar store (or similar place of discounted stuff), find an item that I could relabel and then buy a shopping cart of them. (I got this basic idea from my friend and colleague Rick Stromoski.) I’m pretty sure my clients know that I’m jerry-rigging store-bought cast-offs, but they have seemed to appreciate the humor.

For my illustration clients who didn’t know that I had a comic strip, I’d do a more generic version. Like this one with my face.

A number of clients complimented me on the taste of the hot sauce. I’ve never tasted it myself. The only qualification I was looking for was that I could put of load of the bottles in our bath tub to soak off the original labels.

The “Bo Dough” was also done as a promotion for the strip. I faked-up a few hundred that were mailed out by the Washington Post Writers Group.

I have a couple other Bo holiday gifts that I’ll post in the future (with luck, before Christmas.)

* This isn’t technically true – it just sounded funnier to say it that way. At it’s peak, the strip was indeed in the same number of newspapers as the total fingers and toes on your average human.

Tags: cartoons, Comic strip, comics, entertainment, humor