Poster for ’98 Fair Could Be Coming to Store Near You

Year in and year out, the Ventura County Fair’s promotional posters are perhaps the most-discussed works of art across the county, especially just after they are taped up in storefront windows from Piru to Point Mugu.

More than 3,000 businesses will begin to take delivery of this year’s fair poster--an elaborate cartoon by Ventura commercial artist Chris Martinez--on Saturday.

Everyone has a favorite, be it the popular 1990 bumper car poster or 1985’s carousel horse. Although the jury remains out on the 1996 Farmall tractor poster, it is the one most remembered in conversation, and seems to have a small but hardy band of boosters, say merchants.

This year’s bright-hued poster features caricatures of tap-dancing avocados, lighthearted lemons, an equine Elvis, a pig dressed as Puck from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” smiling strawberries and a Wagnerian cow. They are all aspects of the artist’s vision of the fair’s theme: “The World’s a Stage.”

“No deep meaning,” Martinez said. “Just for fun. Everything in the poster grows in Ventura County--they’re what you’ll see at the fair.”

Mark Linder, who works at Poinsettia Collectibles in Ventura, looked hard at the hot-off-the-presses 1998 poster.

“This says, ‘Let’s have a party,’ ” he said. “It says, ‘Forget the millennium madness and the Y2K problem for a while.’ ”

Linder compared Ventura County fair posters to “Ventura County’s old Sunkist shipping labels--they have all become our own little county collectibles.”

That word “collectible” cuts two ways with Devlin Raley, owner of the Creative Images ad agency and mastermind of the fair’s last 18 posters--including this one.

Raley realized some years ago that the store window promotional posters were becoming so popular that “the purpose for which we made them was being defeated.”

People were taking them down and putting them up on their walls at home before the fair’s opening day, he said. The problem has eased in recent years, now that organizers punch a hole in promotional posters delivered to stores and make high-quality copies available for sale to collectors at $16 each.

Raley said he is gratified at the proprietary feelings people have about the poster.

“Whether they like a given year’s illustration or not, it’s personal. People still ask, ‘Why the bumper car?’ or ‘Why the tractor?’ They really care.”

At Nicholby’s Antiques in downtown Ventura, manager Jason Stowell pointed to a framed bumper car poster marked $75.

“And I recently sold a carousel horse poster for $125. We get calls from people wanting to sell and buy. The carousel is the classic; the bumper car comes next.”

Stowell declined to comment on this year’s poster--the first one that isn’t a photo. But employee Nicole Rungren, standing nearby, gave it a big thumbs up.

“It looks like a party,” she said.

In the Lunch Basket sandwich shop up the street, Vicki Avants was enthusiastic. “I love it. The kids especially are gonna love it.”

Love it or not, Martinez’s poster didn’t present nearly the headache to Raley that the 1976 tide pool photo-poster did.

“That one was the most difficult ever. We constructed a tide pool. We put local sea urchins into it. Then we lit it from the back and from the front for the shoot. It was everything we could do to keep the water cool enough so all those urchins wouldn’t die.”

This year’s poster goes on sale at Seaside Park--formerly Ventura County Fairgrounds--at 9 a.m. today. Raley said any county business that hasn’t received a promotional poster by July 15 may pick one up at Seaside Park by presenting a business card--while the supply lasts.

The fair will run Aug. 5-16.