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| 1929-2022 |
Illustrator Paul Coker Jr's remarkable career rests on three mighty pillars. In the mid-1950s he got hired on at Hallmark Cards and very soon became one of that company's top artists. His scratchy style set a tone for humorous cards that is still widely copied nearly 65 years later. If that wasn't enough, he started contributing to Mad beginning in 1960, and quickly became one of that magazine's mainstay artists. And if that wasn't enough, in the mid-1960s Rankin/Bass Productions asked Coker to design the characters for a stop-motion TV Christmas special titled Santa Claus is Coming to Town. The next year he designed the characters for the more traditionally animated Rankin/Bass TV Christmas special Frosty the Snowman, and just about everything else from that company in the decades since. Though it's his Mad work that I most cherish, the Rankin/Bass productions probably got Coker his widest audience (with the Hallmark cards a close second) and that's also what got him the following 2015 radio interview. Actually, it's kind of a behind-the-scenes radio interview that's a little like an old Bob Newhart routine where you hear only the second half of a phone conversation. But as with Newhart, that's enough:
Seems like a nice guy. Now those three pillars I mentioned:
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