ACME Ink

Started in the early 1900’s as a subsidiary of Sears, Roebuck & Company, it’s original name meant, “American Company Marketing Everything”. Its first branded product was an “ACME American Wrought Anvil”. How it became “Ace Company Making Everything” is a tale, literally, of madness.

Lloyd Christopher, an experimental genius, accidentally developed a new type of ink for animating shorts. It was used for the first time on the first Felix the Cat cartoon who instantly became the first true animated star. Since the ink literally DID animate the characters, saving the humans weeks and months of work, it became THE one and only ink studios wanted.

The side effect was, though, the cartoons eventually didn’t want to go back into the ink bottles. Toontown was drawn for them. And when colored animating ink was developed, that, too, was added to their own little world.

That’s when cartoon reality and human reality began to clash. The barriers between them became so blurred, humans who associated too much with cartoons could end up being more and more toony -- And more and more looney. The more logical the “people”, the less they would be able to deal with cartoon illogic (as they saw it), and could go quite insane! Of course, the reverse was true for cartoons. To find themselves stone-cold ‘sober’ was the true horror! (Remember, cartoons were created so humans could escape their reality, if briefly.)

When the depression hit in 1929 and facing many lawsuits because of the breakdown in human law and order, Sears sold Acme to Marvin Ace (who changed his name to Acme). A practical joker, he loved the idea that anything and everything he could wish for would simply be drawn into reality. ACME went from marketing, then manufacturing ink, to simply Making Everything and anything imaginable. (With guaranteed cartoon effects.)

One of the first humans to become fully toon-ized had had a supremely logical mind that could not cope with the illogic it was constantly assaulted with -- He went murderously insane, trying to destroy what he had fathered. The consequences of Lloyd Christopher’s descent into evil is depicted in ”Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” This event led to erasing the connection that links the human and cartoon worlds.

But A WARNING: Toontown still exists. The Dip only removes - though painfully - a toon’s link to our world. The inks that can reestablish the links still exist. Like a leak in a dam, one link can chain-react to a catastrophic breakdown of not just our reality, but theirs as well.