Welcome back. Hopefully this will pre-sage a series of cartoon Oswald posts.
So here we have a Rub-A-Pencil book (signed by Walter Lantz; the seller had several other Lantz Rub-A-Pencil books signed by him, plus additional Lantz materials, mostly unsigned production materials and those ugly limited cels). Like a coloring book, but half the pages require you to rub a pencil on them to expose the underlying image, and you are not told to color those pages. I mean, I guess; I'm not going to actually try it. I'm assuming the slightly raised invisible ink will repel graphite so it will be a negative line. But maybe it super catches it. The blue pages below are inverted to show the lines. Sorry they're not clearer, the images on the other side of the page, and even on other pages, are clearer than the rub ink.
So, while by 1968, Lantz cartoons looked like crap, the cover art on this is great. Of course, Oswald hadn't appeared in a cartoon in 25 years at this point, but he'd had a longer life in print. Even the black and white images outclass Lantz '68 by a long shot.
So, yeah... a rabbit in a seal costume with a bird tail riding a broom over three quarters moon. One of Saturn's, apparently.
This is Saalfield 5092.
