Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Your Operation

I'm not sure I've actually ever heard of the adult greeting card company called Peppermint Sticks, but this funny get-weller produced by them in 1973 definitely hits on all things Karswellian, ie: funny artwork, campy horror, and sexy ladies! There's seriously so much going on here it'll make your nips spin, from the Peter Lorre lookalike eating a hand sandwich, to the Daisy Mae knock-off revealing the disaster of her recent surgery (uh, don't knock-it too quickly if you think about the possibilities!) We even get Chicago horror host, Svengoolie choking his chicken and crackin' his Berwyn gag from the confines of his cornball coffin. Yep, I give this one a solid 10/10 on the kitsch greeting card scale, --even the minty fresh company logo on the back is tops!

4 comments:

Brian Barnes said...

There's a lot of fun detail here -- the unauthorized sven reference, the skeleton (with a small clump of hair and a tongue left !!!) going after the booze pulled by a string, the brain in the cup, the pin-the-tail on the mascot (took me a bit to figure out what that was!), etc.

BTW, something is off with the copyright date. This had to be at least 79 -- that's when Koze's version of Svengoolie appeared. 73 would have been the earlier vampire hippie Sven from Jerry Bishop.

Mr. Karswell said...

You’re right, it might just be the copyright date for the start of card company

Mr. Cavin said...

Is that a brain in the cup? It's awfully small even before you allow for the big heads in this cartooniverse. I also liked the smattering of pinned tails behind the RCA dog (and the phonograph reimagined as an ear horn raises the conceptual absurdism to a whole new level of recursion).

JMR777 said...

This looks like the type of card featured in the pages of Crazy or Sick Magazine.

They say the sixties were a wild time, but the seventies were a unique experience all their own.