Novel Stamps Tell a Familiar Tale
The 250 Years of Delivering pane delivers on the ubiquitous presence of USPS throughout the years
Every stamp has a tale to tell, but 250 Years of Delivering goes about storytelling in a manner never before employed on postage stamps. The artwork on this pane relates a familiar story told in a novel way — one might say a graphic novel way.
Assigned to devise a stamp project that would involve stamp users as game players, art director Antonio Alcalá started with an assigned working title: “Treasure Hunt.” But what would be the participants’ quarry in this find-it game? “The fact that USPS services every address in the country,” Alcalá figured, “means seeing a mail carrier in one’s neighborhood is a shared experience. One of very few.” Indeed, the most universal and regular interface Americans have with a federal service occurs in a mail carrier’s rounds of collection and delivery. The ubiquity of USPS served up a lot of iconic possibilities.
With the 250th anniversary of America’s postal system on the horizon, the project started to take shape as a fun and fitting manner of celebration. “I thought it might be nice to create an urban scene with various postal-related objects to find,” says Alcalá. The concept became richer once he recruited celebrated cartoonist Chris Ware to co-design and create the artwork.
“Comics are usually thought of as inhabiting a pretty standard grid,” says Ware, “so the typical grid of stamps was a natural fit.” Alcalá provided Ware with a template for a standard pane of 20 vertical commemorative stamps, and the artist used that framework to begin sketching out ideas.
Renowned for his engaging art for dozens of New Yorker magazine covers and for his own epic graphic novels, Ware portrays the passage of time and the richness of memory in a way that makes for grand, sweeping narratives. His approach was perfect for portraying the day-in, year-out routine of postal delivery. He drew inspiration, “thinking about the postal mail carriers I’ve known over the years and imagining what their lives must be like, treading the same paths every day, seeing the same people,… the same things day in and out… watching the seasons change. I focused on trying to understand what it might be like to have a job like that.”
In contrast to the black-bordered frames within his graphic novels, Ware notes that the wavy die-cuts that separate these individual stamps “are essentially invisible and aren’t apparent until the stamp is removed from the sheet. Thus, I tried to give each stamp its own ‘gag’ — cartoonist parlance — which really only becomes apparent when the image is isolated, or framed by empty space, once it’s removed.” Consequently, each stamp succeeds both as its own little scene and as part of the larger scenario.
“I don’t think any book I’ve published hasn’t at least once been reviewed saying it should be accompanied with a magnifying glass,” says Ware of his inclination to include minute detail. “Postage stamps are the perfect medium for me — the standard bearer for smallness and compactness, as in ‘it’s no bigger than a postage stamp.’”
Alcalá recalls the research that assured accuracy of objects depicted on the stamps, and adherence to USPS regulations. For instance, “the carrier had to be wearing black shoes, and the driver of the mail truck had to wear an orange seatbelt.”
Ware, too, found the visual-research process to be eye-opening. “I did my due diligence, taking pictures of postal carriers… which only had the added effect of me noticing just how many postal trucks are out there at any given moment. It’s actually kind of staggering.”
Creating the detailed artwork heightened Ware’s appreciation for postal employees, “who work so extraordinarily hard in conditions both physical and psychological that aren’t always fun — the stereotypical rain, snow, and sleet. They’re all amazing people.” The artist adds, “I wanted to not only communicate that but also to make something that empathized with what I imagined to be their very unique sense of time and experience.”
