I just found out yesterday that the phrase "back to the drawing board" originally came from a cartoon. It was drawn by Peter Arno of
The New Yorker in March 1941 and featured a military aircraft crashing into the ground. As the generals and medics rush to the scene, the engineer is heading the other way, cheerfully saying: "Well, back to the old drawing board". You can see it
here. The only other example of a cartoon phrase entering the vocabulary, that I can think of off the top of my head, is "security blanket", from Charles Schulz's
Peanuts cartoons, but I'm sure there must be many others.
