Photo stand-ins and other stuff that happened (Interconnected)
You know those big illustrated boards with holes in? You poke your face through and you have the body of a cartoon wizard or something, and someone takes a photo. You get them at the seaside and tourist destinations.
The use of an image on a board that could be held up as a foreground below the chin was patented by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in 1874.
The earliest inspiration might be tourist attractions in 19th century Egypt, where a face hole was cut out of a sarcophagus and a sphinx statue (probably plaster reproductions) so that a photo can be taken where the tourist pretends to be a mummy or sphinx.
Art Spiegelman, cartoonist, author of the beautiful, harrowing, Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel/memoir Maus about his father and the Holocaust, was also the inventor of Garbage Pail Kids.
Charlie Mingus, considered one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history, wrote a book on how to train your cat to use a human toilet.
