Okay, so the big #3 up in the corner tells us that this is the third Funky collection from Tempo Books. One immediately noticeable thing is that the cover is no longer hand colored with markers. Taking a step up the ol’ professionalism ladder, I came into possession of a Pantone color guide and made my first use of it with this cover. With the Pantone color guide, you would hand color the art on either a copy or an overlay. Then you would find the color you wanted on the color guide and then write the corresponding number on your overlay. This allowed for color consistency to be established between you and the printer who would simply match the same numbers from his Pantone chart. I’ve probably described something akin to blacksmithing here, but it’s pretty much like color picking off of the color swatches in Photoshop.
Tempo was licensing a lot of cartoon properties at this point and kind of just throwing them out there with no real marketing or promotion. So whenever I was in a place where these books were sold, usually on racks in a drugstore, I would go through the rack, find my books, and move them all to the front of the rack. This was based on the God helps those who help themselves theory of marketing.
