Earn Big Money At Last! Learn Animation!

“If you can draw a circle, we can teach you animated cartooning.”

Animators, the 1938 ad claims, can earn up $20,000 a year, which would be the equivalent of nearly $700,000 in today’s money. That probably didn’t happen very often, if at all, but animator Art Babbitt did make $11,363 at Disney in 1936, which would be $455,000 today. That’s nothing though compared to what comic strip artists used to earn. Mutt and Jeff creator Bud Fisher pulled in $150,000 in 1916, or $11.9 million in today’s dollars.

Alvin Epstein, the co-owner of the animation school in the ad, published How to Draw Animated Cartoons in 1945: