Here at Pictorama we’ve decided to kick of the holiday season with a multi-post look back at some of the Deitch-Butler cards of years past. We have never dated our cards and, other than by identifying the cats portrayed in the cards (even that is a tad sketchy – there have been a lot of tuxedoes!), I have no real idea of dates.

Kim and I collaborated on our first card only a little more than a month after we first started dating. He was between projects and I had started making Christmas a Valentine’s Day cards a few years before so I suggested it. Sorry to say, I have not uncovered card number one yet, although I am sure either the original art or one of the cards exists in my files or his somewhere. By my calculation, this years card should be our twenty-first!

The unwritten rule about drawing the cards is, if we appear as figures, we draw ourselves. In early years this lead to a slightly strange combination of styles, although over the years we have somehow managed to come up with some thing coherent. I usually do a first draft, then Kim – back to me and then he inks.

Here I offer three examples featuring us with our cats of days gone by, Otto and Zippy. Ho, ho, ho!