The Ashes started today. If you’ve never heard of the Ashes, or you don’t really get cricket—I have a cartoon for you at the bottom of this post.
Anyway, bats ‘n’ balls are the themes for this week’s email. Cricket and baseball. Two wonderful, but fundamentally silly games.
Let’s start with a cartoon from Air Mail, in 2020:
The United States of Cricket
The first officially recorded game of cricket in America, was played thirty years before the dawn of baseball.
In 2022, I went back in time to illustrate the occasion, for the American Bystander:
You can see the full image here.
Baseball Origins
Speaking of the dawn of baseball, here’s another historically accurate drawing for Airmail, from 2021.
Sketchbookery
You never really know which sketches will bear fruit, but sometimes you get very lucky. One way or another, the published cartoons above, all stemmed from this doodle: