Cartoon by Bill Harrison.
Bill Harrison was an American cartoonist and greeting card designer. During the 1950s and 1960s, his one-panel cartoons and occasional gag comics ran in magazines such as Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post. In 1959, he founded his own greeting card company, Harrison Publishing, which is still in business today.
Early life and career
William Sherman Harrison, Jr., was born in 1927 in Asheville, North Carolina. During the late 1940s, he attended UNC Chapel Hill, where his earliest cartoons ran in the local campus magazine Tarnation. He also made more serious portraits of American football players playing at his campus, which were printed on the booklets handed out during the campus sports' games.
Cartoon published in the Saturday Evening Post (1950).
Cartooning career
After graduation in 1949, Harrison became a full-time cartoonist. His gag cartoons ran in Argosy, Ladies' Home Journal, Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post and Sports Illustrated. Many featured gentle comedy set in suburban neighborhoods. Between 5 January 1959 and 17 March 1962, his 'Guess Who...' feature was syndicated nationally by The Chicago Sun-Times. This was a series of pantomime strips in which the reader had to guess which character said or did a particular thing, even though this was quite obvious from the cartoon itself. Harrison's cartoons were collected in book compilations by Avon Books, Charlton, Collier's, Curtis Publishing Company, Dell, Triangle Publications and The American Legion. They have been translated in Norwegian and Spanish.
'Guess Who...' cartoon of 23 January 1959.
Greeting cards
Since Harrison had a large family to support (five children), he took as many graphic assignments as he could, for instacce designing flyers for local churches and religious communities. In 1959, he took the bold step of establishing his own greeting card company, Harrison Publishing. He released several series of humorous cards, classified by topic, ranging from season greetings, birthdays to wishing well cards. Harrison also offered what he called "customer cards": direct mail marketing for businesses that salespeople, real estate agents and other professionals would use to sustain contact with existing clients and introduce themselves to potential new ones. After a while, Harrison Publishing attracted clients throughout the United States. Harrison's five sons have all worked in the family business at one point.
In 2003, Bill Harrison's health struggles, combined with the popularity of online communications, contributed to the company's closure in 2003. The cartoonist died later that year in his birthtown, at the age of 76. In December 2022, Harrison's artist son Greg Harrison relaunched his father's greeting card service under the name Harrison Greetings. Since then, he has been busy scanning his father's vast collection of designs, and making them available for orders. Prior to this, Greg Harrison has been a designer and performer on the TV show 'Pee-wee's Playhouse' (1986-1990), and also designed and directed music videos, ads and series for MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central.
Cartoon by Bill Harrison.