MORE ABOUT COMIC POST CARDS

Gee, I miss the vacation post cards (above) that were all over the Jersey boardwalks when I was a kid.

The cards (above) were nice and cartoony, and had a linen veneer that took color really well. They were probably printed in offset but some were so bright and saturated that I wouldn't rule out lithography.

Lots of the cards were risque but they avoided censorship somehow.

Maybe that's because the captions always were always couched in double meanings. Strangely, parents (at least American parents) rarely objected to their kids buying them. Maybe they figured that we wouldn't understand the sex references and, by and large...we didn't. We just bought them for the cartoons.

By the way, the picture above is by Donald McGill, the prolific British post card humorist, and the subject of a well-known essay by George Orwell: "The Art of Donald McGill." McGill came out of the bawdy British Music Hall tradition, the same as Benny Hill.

The Orwell essay:  http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/McGill/english/e_mcgill



For those who aren't familiar with Benny Hill, I offer the brief video above.

Anyway, even today I don't always get the jokes on those old cards. I think I understand the joke above, but I'm not sure.

Boy, some good cartoonists worked in that field (above). Here's a British ad for beer that's done in the vacation card style.

Here's (above) a later vacation card, probably done at the time they were being phased out. Are my eyes deceiving me, or is that drawn by Will Elder?