Konnichiwa WcDonald's

by Bruce Guthrie

Not being an anime aficionado, I was surprised to find that my McDonald's cup had a "W" instead of an "M" on it this week.  And there were Japanese characters next to it which the Google Translate software on my smartphone translated as "Wak Donald".  Was this a yakuza signal to take out the Republican front runner?

Apparently not.  Little known to me, a fictional WcDonald's franchise was introduced to manga back in 1981 when they wanted to refer to a food franchise like McDonald's but didn't want to run into trademark issues.  ( https://fictionalcompanies.fandom.com/wiki/WcDonald%27s )  This month, McDonald's announced a tie-in to the fictional franchise starting on February 26.

Their regular website describes this as:

What Is the WcDonald’s Isekai?

Isekai is a popular anime genre that explores a story’s main character who suddenly finds themselves transported to a parallel “otherworld.” A fixture across various anime and manga titles and genres, WcDonald’s has been an indelible part of anime culture for decades. From it comes the new Savory Chili WcDonald’s Sauce! Dip into another universe and immerse yourself in WcDonald’s, artistically realized to serve as homage to fans of anime and the Golden Arches alike.

There are lots of in-store promotions for this campaign including bags (possibly only the medium and small sized ones), the cups, the backs of receipts, and videos on the order kiosks and behind the counter.  There's also a new promotional website ( https://www.wcdonalds.com ).  All of this is to promote a new McNuggets sauce.  (Which is really spicy!)

The website offers a free miniseries of four video shorts and four manga chapters.  Currently, only the first set is up -- the first comic is a 24-page PDF -- but presumably the other sets will be added each week as the campaign continues.  The story appears to start on the medium-size bag and can be read below.

As far as I can tell, the WcDonald's website only serves up the episodes if you use the QR scan code to access it.  If you access the www.wcdonalds.com site directly, you're told that you have to unlock each episode.  If you don't have a device with a QR-reading built-in camera (like a desktop PC), you're SOL.  Once you use the QR code, there's a cookie that's saved on your smartphone/laptop/PC which tells the system you're kosher and lets you see the episode.  Maybe that will change as complaints mount.  

Having said that, if you type in the short URL from your desktop browser -- 3wqv.short.gy/aZ1 -- things should work fine.  I have to presume that McD's isn't issuing multiple bags with different QR codes each week so the new episodes should magically show up each week along with the old ones.

(You can access the first issue of the comic directly via: https://www.wcdonalds.com/pdf/2rg5pBDamf.pdf .  The first video is https://www.wcdonalds.com/episode?id=1   I suspect id=2, id=3, and id=4 will be activated later. )

Officially, the campaign ends on March 24.

Nerdist has a great article about the campaign on https://nerdist.com/article/mcdonalds-serves-up-an-anime-and-manga-experience-with-special-wcdonalds-celebration/

Some images (and, yes, I felt like an idiot photographing the screens above the counter...)

Secret History of Comics - Ephemera Finds in TN

 One of the things I like to do is wander around antique stores and junk shops. Here's some stuff I found in Tennessee last month.

This is a Herblock cover caricaturing Art Buchwald for Newsweek that I didn't know existed, so I was quite surprised by it.

This appears to be an advertising card for Union Pacific Tea from the latter half of the nineteenth century. It's being donated to the Library of Congress soon.

This matchbook looked like a New Yorker cartoonist to me so I reached out to historian/cartoonist Michael Maslin:

Maslin wrote back, "Not all of the faces, but a few (figs a&b), look like Steig's early work. The fellow extreme lower right most especially (fig. a) . But I'm not confident enough to say it is Steig's work."

fig. a

fig. b

Beetle Bailey original comic strip 9/13/1993. 

Note that the dealer thought it was a print, and not the original, and priced it accordingly.

A Buck Rogers post-production mini-poster by Dave Perillo that's being donated to Library of Congress.

Three British digest-sized comic books that will be donated to the Library of Congress comic book collection. The cover photos have been added to the Grand Comics Database already.

WorldCat doesn't list any copies in the United States, and almost none worldwide. When Randy Scott was at Michigan State's comic book collection, I would feed material such as this to them.

Love Story Picture Library #1259

Star Love Stories #591

Love Story Picture Library #1254

World War II cartoon postcards are easy to find, but the antique mall was waiting 

on me to close so I felt compelled to buy something.

Note the dental drill, for graphic medicine fans.

Warren Bernard's Willard Mullin collection (pre-Columbia U donation)

 Warren Bernard spent years collecting sports cartoonist Willard Mullin artwork and ephemera. Before he donated it to Columbia University this month, he had a showing of material at his house. With his permission, here are photos of the material that went to NYC (with a few ringers that stayed home with him).  

Prof. Joseph Witek sent me a note about this post. "In one of the random projects that came my way back in the helter-skelter pioneer days of comics studies, I wrote the Dictionary of American Biography entry for Willard Mullin (who I had never previously heard of). Mullin was just an excellent cartoonist / caricaturist from back in the day when sports cartoons were the sports-page counterpart of editorial cartoons, during an era when boxing (Joe Louis), thoroughbred racing, and East Coast college football were the premier sports in US culture (the Army-Navy game was once a huge deal).  But Mullin covered a bit of everything."

And the ringers, Winsor McCay, Gluyas Williams, and Bringing up Father posters.