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Wayback Whensday Sports Issue – Topps Cartoons/Peanuts All-Stars

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D. D. Degg Updated: September 17, 2025 at 1:08 pm EDT 1 minute 0 comments

Who Drew the Classic Topps Baseball Cartoons? Part III

Here in Part III, we will identify the last of the three contributors to the 1960 set. My identification will be based entirely on stylistic comparisons, as I do not have any external corroboration that the artist I will name ever worked in any capacity for Topps. Here the work of identification becomes a little more difficult, and tentative, and it requires more pictures and detailed descriptions. As always, differences of opinion are welcome, while evidence that contradicts my assertions is even more welcome.

In Who Drew the Classic Topps Baseball Cartoons? Part III Eric White guesses Amadee Wohlschlaeger as the cartoonist of the Joe Nuxhall 1960 card and then changes his mind to a more definite identity.

A rosin bag and recurring sports reporter, along with the drawing style, are tells to the anonymous cartoonist.

In the cartoon for Casey Stengel’s card #227 – one of the sixteen manager cards that are perhaps the most noteworthy of Darvas’ works in the 1960 set – the evocative managerial caricature shows Casey making much too much sense as he speaks with a sportswriter. This middle-aged reporter, smoking a cigarette while wearing thick glasses and a jaunty trilby, was sort of a stock character for [Lou] Darvas.

Charlie Brown’s Animated Baseball All-Stars

Good grief! How could we possibly have a survey of baseball cartoons without encountering Good Ol’ Charlie Brown? This week, we devote our entire allotted space to coverage of the various game days of the Peanuts gang – the only team ever to take the field with a dog at shortstop, a second baseman carrying a blanket, a crabby loudmouth girl in the outfield, and a blockhead on the mound. While some of their shorter film vignettes may be too numerous to comprehensively cover, and a certain degree of repetition of material was prevalent to the series, I’ll try to hit the highlights of the gang’s illustrious playbook, and Charlie Brown’s repeated discoveries that little league managing can often cause more stomach-aches than being in the big leagues.

At Cartoon Resources Charles Gardner devotes part 17(!) of his Cartoons at Bat to the Peanuts crew.

There’s a lot of baseball in Charlie Brown’s life – more than will comfortably fit in one article. I will thus divide the material into two installments. This first chapter deals with the early specials and features, on through the run of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Later series and specials will be discussed next week.

While the baseball sub-genre was already well established by Charles Schulz’s comic strip long before the film’s debut, for animation fans, the action all started with Charlie Brown’s All Stars! (Lee Memdelson/Bill Melendez, 6/8/66). The film opens with Charlie on the mound, and his pitch receiving a solid sock from an unknown batsman…

As mentioned above this is part 17 of Gardner’s multi-part series of “Cartoons at Bat” columns for the baseball season of 2025. Check out earlier, and forthcoming, installments at his Animation Trails page.