Earlier this week, cartoonist Jeffrey Koterba received two of his cartoons (including the cartoon pictured above) that had made a journey to outer space and back to Earth.
The cartoonist fulfilled a life-long dream, sending two cartoons along with the space shuttle earlier this year. “As far as anyone knows, mine are the first cartoons in space since sketches of Snoopy flew aboard one of the Apollo missions,” he explained to GalleyCat. In his memoir, Inklings, Koterba explored the significance of Dogie the Doggie–the cartoon dog floating in the cartoon.
In an ABC News essay this spring, he explained how the cartoons ended up in space: “[A] cartoon I had drawn about Clayton Anderson, the only Nebraska-born astronaut, had been e-mailed to him on board the International Space Station by another Nebraska native, Jeff Raikes, at the time an executive with Microsoft. Anderson had e-mailed from orbit to tell me how much he had enjoyed the cartoon. Then, last fall, Anderson asked if I would be willing to create two cartoons that he could transport on his next shuttle flight, certifying that the drawings had flown in orbit.”