One Sheet: Wile E. Coyote and the Acme Missile Co.

One Sheet is a series about single objects from the boxes.

The joke is forty years long

Chuck Jones started sending Wile E. Coyote parcels from the Acme Corporation in 1949. Rockets, anvils, giant rubber bands, jet-propelled roller skates, an Acme Missile. Every one of them worked exactly as designed and every one of them failed the coyote.

Acme never existed. It became, over four decades, the most famous fictional company in the world — a running gag about mail-order optimism that people still reach for when a product disappoints them.

And here it is on a t-shirt transfer, licensed from Warner Bros, printed for a shop wall.

Why this one is expensive

At $120 it’s among the dearest cartoon sheets we hold, and that’s scarcity rather than showmanship — it’s the only one we’ve got, and we’ve not seen another.

It also sits inside a bigger pattern. We hold Road Runner twice, Wile E. Coyote, Bugs, Daffy three times, Sylvester three times, Tweety four times. That isn’t a printer buying one design. That’s Roach Studios holding a standing Warner Bros licence and working it hard.

The detail we like

The coyote never once blamed Acme. He kept ordering. That’s the joke, and it’s a better joke than most of what was printed in 1977.

See the sheet · Why we hold four Tweety Birds