Precursors

Here's a precursor to Kirsty MacColl's song "In These Shoes?"  The caption reads, "Not in these shoes."  From Fun magazine, 1879.

Here's a 1917 precursor to filmmaker David Lynch, by Evans for the Baltimore American, reproduced in Cartoons Magazine.

Here's a precursor to the manga character Naruto, from Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton, 1922.

This "Cobweb Ghost" is an ancestor of the Haunted Mansion's attic bride.  From Judy, Or The London Serio-Comic Journal, 1876.  (We're delighted to have contributed this item to this post over at Long Forgotten Haunted Mansion.)

Before there was Roz Chast, there was Chas. Ross.   See How to Be Your Own Cat.

Here's a precursor to Haruli Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, with its library of unicorn skulls containing dreams.  "As it appears, though dead so long / Each scull is found to have a tongue."  From The English Dance of Death, from the Designs of Thomas Rowlandson, 1903.

Here's a precursor to a Koopa attacking Mario and Luigi.  From the September 1938 issue of the Old Line magazine, as scanned by the University of Maryland Libraries.  Previously, we uncovered a vintage Koopa sitting by a Warp Pipe.

Here's a precursor to a scene in the hilarious British series People Like Us, in which a proposed building is discovered to be "facing the wrong way."  In Punch, 1877, "The front's behind!"

Here's a precursor to performance artist Leigh Bowery.  "New idea for a fancy ball.  Shave your head, and go as a phrenological bust."  From Punch, 1878.

Here's a precursor to the animated busts in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," diagrammed in Stephen Watkins Clark's A Practical Grammar, 1864.

Here are precursors to "We Invert the Light," the darkly cinematic soundscape by AnakhronikoN.  Our illustrations are from El Mundo Físico by A. Guillemin, 1882.

Here's a precursor to B. Kliban's Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head.  From An American Family in Germany by John Ross Browne, 1866.

Before handy phone cameras, people had to sketch their surreptitious pictures.  From Punch, 1867.

Here's a precursor to the 1987 "This Is Your Brain on Drugs" anti-narcotics campaign, which showed an egg frying in a pan.  "Neuropatia" is by Fernando Calleja for Cosmópolis, 1929.

Here's a precursor to the Archie McPhee cat mask, from engraver Tirzah Garwood in 1930. 

Here's a precursor to a Koopa next to a Warp Pipe in Nintendo's Mario universe. From the August 1942 issue of the Old Line magazine, as scanned by the University of Maryland Libraries.

Here's a precursor to AirB&B, complete with "the proverbial bedroom," from The Hawaiian Gazette., May 26, 1911.

Long before the frogs were singing in the Budweiser ads, they were working for Ford Motor's Model T.

Here's a precursor to Carl Sandburg's Potato Face Blind Man from Rootabaga Stories.  It's "a supposed specimen of aboriginal art" discovered in New Brunswick, 1851, from the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1881.