IM THE GUY PINBACKS



There are two types of "I'm the Guy" buttons. The first show a humorous caption on a plain solid colored pin. The other type has a comic caption plus a cartoon picture. Several cartoonists of the day (1910-16) drew the pictures for these pinbacks. Most worked for William Randolph Hearst at some time in their careers.







All of the picture pinbacks have a picture of a comic character that sometimes is with no specific relation to the caption. These pictures are found in white drawings on solid color backgrounds of red or blue, plain black and white, and lastly the multicolored.







Less common, are the plain red and blue and next the black-on-white pictures. The rarest ones are those which are two-tone white-on-dark format found in red on white and blue on white. At one point in my collecting I was told the different styles of pins each had different sayings and pictures but have now decided to collect the multicolored pins because there have only been three that I have not yet found in the multi colored style.



Owing to their graphics, their colors, and the association with well-known cartoonists of the period, the cartoon pinbacks are very "collectible".







It was the cartoonist / humorist Rube Goldberg who is given creditf or coining the gag phrase "I'm the guy who...." circa 1910. This was a stock saying by characters in a comic strip Goldberg drew (Boob McNutt). The phrase became very popular, and Goldberg elaborated it over time. He was even co-author of a song entitled "I'm the Guy", whose lyrics were largely comprised of variations on this catch phrase.







The artists for these pins were Dirks, Fisher, Goldberg, HBM, Herriman, Hoffman, Manger, McMannus, Payne, Tad, Tep and a few unknowns.