In 1999, Jeremy Adolphson, then 17, began sending artists that he likes 4″ x 6″ notecards in the mail with a stamped return envelope and a request to draw him a picture. Now, he has hundreds of amazing artworks from the likes of Dan Clowes, Hunt Emerson, Chester Brown, Seth, Chris Ware, Roberta Gregory, Will Eisner, our Fantagraphics informant Eric Reynolds, and many many more. Seen here, from left to right, drawings by Seth, Daniel Clowes, and Will Eisner.
From 4×6-art.com:
I was brought up at an early age reading comic books, as I grew older, I eventually found myself standing among thousands of people at the Rosemont Convention Center for Wizard World 1999. The cramped passageways, loud noises, and individuals from all over the world was my first encounter with a comic book convention. I saw fans handing out sketchbooks to artists and purchasing commissions for them to scribble something , an original work, for their collection. This intrigued me, that someone would take time out their schedule and actually draw something specifically for you. Something like this was much more personal than say an autograph or even purchasing artwork that has been published before. After the show ended, my desire to collect artwork continued to soar. While comic book conventions usually only occur once a year in a given city, it would become too costly to travel across the nation acquiring art. I needed to find a way to continue this throughout the year and to make it efficient to do this through the mail. There would be too great a risk to send out a sketchbook through the mail for fear of it becoming lost. I remembered seeing postcards with First Day stamps whereby syndicated cartoonists would autograph it along with putting a doodle of their most known character on it, then mailing it back to the person. So, I drew from this, along with my grandfather’s movie star autograph collection on index cards, and decided to mail a card along with the return postage to some illustrators to see if I received anything back…