Studio cards

Studio cards were tall, narrow humorous greeting cards which became popular during the 1950s. The approach was sometimes cutting or caustic, a distinct alternative to the type of mild humor previously employed by the major greeting card companies.

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 bought up shopping mall franchises so only Hallmark Cards would be displayed.

In 1945, when Slavic was in the Merchant Marine, 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. 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.

The cartoonist Bill Box first experimented with his 1951 Bop Cards showing hipster figures on Christmas cards. 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.

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 Kurtzman's Mad 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."

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