Studio cards
Encyclopedia
Pioneer publishers of studio cards were Rosalind Welcher, Fred Slavic, Nellie Caroll, Bill Kennedy and Bill Box. These independent card creators eventually found it difficult to compete after Hallmark Cards
Hallmark Cards
Hallmark Cards is a privately owned American company based in Kansas City, Missouri. Founded in 1910 by Joyce C. Hall, Hallmark is the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States. In 1985, the company was awarded the National Medal of Arts....
bought up shopping mall franchises so only Hallmark Cards would be displayed.
Panda Prints
In 1945, when Slavic was in the Merchant MarineUnited States Merchant Marine
The United States Merchant Marine refers to the fleet of U.S. civilian-owned merchant vessels, operated by either the government or the private sector, that engage in commerce or transportation of goods and services in and out of the navigable waters of the United States. The Merchant Marine is...
, he and Welcher met in New York at a USO dance, and the following year, they became partners in a greeting card business, Panda Prints, with Welcher doing the artwork and Slavic handling the business and manufacturing aspects. They initially silk screened their cards because they were unable to afford a printing press.
Although the tall card shape was already in existence at other companies, Panda Prints injected fresh cartoon humor into that format, and the studio card was born. Soon Welcher was designing 200 cards a year, many in contrast to the saccharin sentiments expressed by established card companies. Her best-selling card combined the song title "Stay as Sweet as You Are" with a happily sloshed woman drinking herself under the table. Some of her greeting cards are in the print collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
. Although Panda Prints, feeling the Hallmark squeeze, folded in 1977, Slavic and Welcher are still in business, publishing books written and illustrated by Welcher at their West Hill Press in New Hampshire.
Bop Cards
Christmas card
A Christmas card is a greeting card sent as part of the traditional celebration of Christmas in order to convey between people a range of sentiments related to the Christmas and holiday season. Christmas cards are usually exchanged during the weeks preceding Christmas Day by many people in Western...
s. Although Los Angeles gift shops initially showed little interest, sales soared at the USC and UCLA student stores. His cards were tall, explained Box, because he was more comfortable drawing standing figures and because #10 envelopes were the least expensive he could find.
Box Cards
Bill Kennedy and Box met in 1954 when both were working as Los Angeles parking lot attendants. After they launched Box Cards in the mid-1950s with a few California accounts, they attended the New York Stationery Show, where they added more accounts and acquired representatives. The timing was perfect, since Box Cards introduced humor and vitality to the moribund greeting card industry at the same time Harvey KurtzmanHarvey Kurtzman
Harvey Kurtzman was an American cartoonist and the editor of several comic books and magazines. Kurtzman often signed his name H. Kurtz, followed by a stick figure Harvey Kurtzman (October 3, 1924, Brooklyn, New York – February 21, 1993) was an American cartoonist and the editor of several comic...
's Mad
Mad (magazine)
Mad is an American humor magazine founded by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines in 1952. Launched as a comic book before it became a magazine, it was widely imitated and influential, impacting not only satirical media but the entire cultural landscape of the 20th century.The last...
was making a transition from comic book to magazine. College freshmen who had read Mad while in high school were delighted to find their college bookstores giving a prominent display to Box Cards with such lines as: "Now that you're older... go play in the street."
Nellie Caroll and Joel Beck
Nellie Caroll drew her Lady Chatter cartoon panel for the Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
from May 9, 1965 to November 15, 1965. Kennedy liked what Caroll had produced for her Nellie Card Company, and she became the first artist hired by Box Cards. Another contributor to Box Cards was the cartoonist Joel Beck, credited as one of the founders of the underground comics movement in the mid-1960s. Only a few years before he first published Penthouse
Penthouse (magazine)
Penthouse, a men's magazine founded by Bob Guccione, combines urban lifestyle articles and softcore pornographic pictorials that, in the 1990s, evolved into hardcore. Penthouse is owned by FriendFinder Network. formerly known as General Media, Inc. whose parent company was Penthouse International...
in 1965, Bob Guccione
Bob Guccione
Bob Guccione was the founder and publisher of the adult magazine Penthouse. He resigned from his publisher position in November 2003.-Early life:...
drew cartoons for Box Cards. Other cartoonists who drew Box Cards were Harry Crane, Jerry Lee and Bill Brewer
National Cartoonists Society
The National Cartoonists Society is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the troops...
, who had a long career with Hallmark and won the National Cartoonists Society
National Cartoonists Society
The National Cartoonists Society is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the troops...
Greeting Cards Award in 2000.
The success of Box Cards did not go unnoticed by the major greeting card companies, and by 1957, Hallmark, American Greetings
American Greetings
American Greetings Corporation, Inc. is the world's largest publicly-traded greeting card company. It is based in Brooklyn, Ohio and sells paper greeting cards, electronic greeting cards, party products , and electronic expressive content...
, Rust Craft, Norcross and Gibson Greetings all were publishing studio cards. In the decades that followed, humorous cards evolved through many different approaches at the major companies and came full circle in 1993 when Gibson made a licensing agreement with Mad
Mad (magazine)
Mad is an American humor magazine founded by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines in 1952. Launched as a comic book before it became a magazine, it was widely imitated and influential, impacting not only satirical media but the entire cultural landscape of the 20th century.The last...
to publish a 1994 line of Mad greeting cards with artwork by the Mad cartoonists.
Beatniks
Hallmark labeled their early 1950s line Fancy Free, and American Greetings called theirs Hi Brows. In its official history, American Greetings acknowledges Hi Brows were published in 1957 because the earlier studio cards were a cartooning breakthrough:- BeatnikBeatnikBeatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical...
s launched the anti-establishment movement in the 1950s, and Americans began to question tradition. Building on this counterculture momentum, American Greetings introduced a new kind of greeting card - Hi Brows. These irreverent, witty cards were slim and tall. Even the name of the cards was a rebellious parody. The inspiration for Hi Brows came from funny cards being made by Bohemian artists in their Greenwich Village studios. Hi Brows featured short, comic punch lines and cartoon-style artwork, a new generation of greeting cards to help a new generation communicate.
Mort Sahl
Morton Lyon "Mort" Sahl is a Canadian-born American comedian and actor. He occasionally wrote jokes for speeches delivered by President John F. Kennedy. He was the first comedian to record a live album and the first to perform on college campuses...
, who wrote:
- My initial exposure to the new awareness cards, as I shall refer to them, was not in the area of shock, because I recognized them for what they were. This is a cliché but they were a sign of the times. This isn't so much the beat generationBeat generationThe Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, as Alfred BesterAlfred BesterAlfred Bester was an American science fiction author, TV and radio scriptwriter, magazine editor and scripter for comic strips and comic books...
has pointed out, as the hip generation. The greatest disservice we can do ourselves is not to be aware of our times and how things are changing. Now the things we dared not say in the old days, especially when we observed the saccharine reverence of unworthy institutions, has gone the other way. It's gone full circle. People now state their hostility, or if they're much too busy being caught up in the squirrel cage, they let the Box Cards state their hostility for them. This is not to say that I think the work of Bill Box is merely a statement of hostility or anything sick.
With the major card companies taking over, Box looked elsewhere. Leaving the card business, he had a successful career as a comedy writer for top talents, including Jonathan Winters
Jonathan Winters
-Early life:Winters was born in Bellbrook, Ohio, the son of Alice Kilgore , a radio personality, and Jonathan Harshman Winters II, an investment broker. He is a descendant of Valentine Winters, founder of the Winters National Bank in Dayton, Ohio...
, Steve Allen
Steve Allen
Steve Allen may refer to:*Steve Allen , American musician, comedian, and writer*Steve Allen , presenter on the London-based talk radio station LBC 97.3...
, Phyllis Diller
Phyllis Diller
Phyllis Diller is an American actress and comedian. She created a stage persona of a wild-haired, eccentrically dressed housewife who makes jokes about a husband named "Fang" while pretending to smoke from a long cigarette holder...
and George Gobel
George Gobel
George Leslie Gobel was an American comedian and actor. He was best known as the star of his own weekly NBC television show, The George Gobel Show, which ran from 1954 to 1960 .-Early years:He was born George Leslie Goebel in Chicago, Illinois, His father, Hermann Goebel, was a...
. His work for television included gagwriting for several Dean Martin Roasts. Box retired in 1985 but occasionally contributes to Duck Press ("America's Golf Greeting Card Company") in Tucson.
Bernad Creations
In 1954, Bernad Creations published Herb Gardner's characters, the Nebbishes, on greeting cards, posters and figurines. The most famous of these showed two slacker Nebbishes relaxing with feet on a table and the line, "Next week we've got to get organized!" First a greeting card and then a poster, it was so popular that the gagline became a national catch phraseCatch phrase
A catchphrase is a phrase or expression recognized by its repeated utterance. Such phrases often originate in popular culture and in the arts, and typically spread through a variety of mass media , as well as word of mouth...
. In 1959-60, Gardner did The Nebbishes as a syndicated comic strip, and his autobiographical novel, A Piece of the Action (1958), has a thinly disguised recounting of the creation and marketing of his characters.
Bernad Creations also published cards by The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
cartoonist William Steig
William Steig
William Steig was a prolific American cartoonist, sculptor and, later in life, an author of popular children's literature...
. His "People are no damn good!" card earned him $250,000 in royalties.