Old postcards Club merry men

The Club of Merry Little Men is a group of fairy-tale characters who became the regular heroes of stories and comics in Merry Pictures (Vesyolye Kartinki), a Soviet humour magazine for young children published since September 1956. The magazine was founded on the initiative of the artist Ivan Semenov (1906–1982), who remained its editor-in-chief until 1972. The club is chaired by Pencil (Karandash), an artist with a magic pencil, invented by Semenov and the writer Yuri Druzhkov; Semenov drew him in 1956, and Druzhkov’s book The Adventures of Pencil and Samodelkin followed in 1964.

The cards here are a 1971 set with one card per member: “Merry Pencil”, Samodelkin the robot handyman, Buratino, Cipollino, Dunno (Neznayka), Petrushka, Hurvínek and Thumbelina. In 1971 the magazine’s circulation reached 5.6 million copies a month.

Most members came from books and the stage: Buratino from Aleksey Tolstoy’s The Golden Key, Cipollino from Gianni Rodari’s 1951 tale, Dunno from Nikolay Nosov’s books, Thumbelina from Andersen (she is the only girl in the club), Petrushka from Russian folk puppet theatre, and Hurvínek from the Czech puppet stage of Josef Skupa, where he first appeared in 1926.

These Soviet postcards of the club’s characters can be studied in detail on the scans of the originals.