CHICAGO — What’s older than the Declaration of Independence? Believe it or not: the United States Postal Service.
The organization now known as the USPS was established in July 1775 — one year before the 13 original colonies declared themselves to be their own nation. This week, the agency celebrates its semiquincentennial with a creative new stamp design featuring artwork by local cartoonist extraordinaire Chris Ware.
The stamps will be released Wednesday, along with a 32-page prestige booklet to commemorate the USPS’ 250 years of service.
The postal service noted in a statement that Ware created the stamp artwork and co-designed the pane with Antonio Alcalá, an art director for USPS.
“I was indeed flattered and honored to be asked to do a stamp,” Ware told Block Club.
“I figured I would either scare off the Post Office with my ideas and/or make something that wasn’t printable,” he said. Instead, “I was pleasantly surprised to find that everyone working for the USPS was unpretentious, funny and very agreeable.”
Despite his penchant for self-deprecation, writer-artist Ware has managed to attain worldwide renown on the strength of his meticulously rendered, achingly moving comics. His work has been featured in multiple solo museum exhibitions, from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006 to a current showcase in Barcelona. The first comics artist to be invited to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial, he also regularly draws covers for The New Yorker.
An Omaha native, Ware moved to Chicago in the early 1990s to pursue his master’s degree at the School of the Art Institute. Now 57, he lives with his wife and daughter in west-suburban Riverside.
His professional career began in Chicago’s alt weeklies, starting with NewCity in 1992 and eventually The Reader. A multiyear saga originally published piecemeal in those newsprint pages became his acclaimed first book, “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” still in print 25 years later.
To anyone familiar with Ware’s precise sequential art — jam-packed with details yet somehow never cluttered — it comes as no surprise that he has brought that signature storytelling style to the USPS.
With these stamps, he adds another “first” feather to his cap: “A very kind person at the USPS told me that, as far as their historian could determine, this was the first time anyone had ever tried to tell a story with a sheet of stamps,” Ware said.
Titled “250 Years of Delivering,” the sheet honors the post office’s milestone anniversary by documenting the quotidian life of a mail carrier making deliveries. The 20 interconnected stamps (printed in four rows of five) deliver a bird’s-eye view of a busy city, packed with perfectly drawn buildings, geometric trees and dozens of humans bustling about. In inimitable Chris Ware fashion, the progression of stamps also takes the viewer through all four seasons.
The carrier strolls past coffee shops, government buildings and various public gatherings across her busy year, visiting settings that would fit into any Chicago neighborhood. Across the stamps, she waves frequently and accepts letters from neighbors, including a construction worker who pops out of a manhole cover to give her one. The last stamp shows the carrier in her cozy home with her family, after an extremely long day.
In a press release, the post office notes that the Ware-designed stamps contain special homages to the office’s 250-year history, including a statue of a pony express rider and various types of post office vehicles and collection boxes, from a cluster mailbox found in an apartment building to the traditional blue curbside structures. There’s even a stamp collector examining his collection.
“I was hoping to make something that a letter carrier might happen to see and maybe feel some connection to,” Ware said. “Their lives seem to be a ‘Groundhog Day’ level of grind and repetition, passing through a consistent, repeating landscape that nonetheless slowly shifts and changes around them. It takes a peculiar level of psychological fortitude to be a mail carrier, I think, and I wanted to try to honor that.”
Beyond his current admiration for the work of postal carriers, Ware had a brief connection to the post office as a kid.
“I tried briefly to collect stamps,” he said. “For some reason, I couldn’t ever figure out why I was doing it — no pox upon philatelists, with whom I clearly share some DNA. I’d inherited a half-filled book of stamps from my second father, but it only highlighted how ignorant I was about the world, so I stuck to collecting superhero comic books instead.
“Now I hate superheroes in all forms, so maybe I should try stamps again.”
The sheet of 20 stamps costs $15.60 and will be sold online and at any U.S. post office starting Wednesday. The price reflects a slight bump in the cost per stamp, which on July 13 increased by a nickel to 78 cents each.
Listen to the Block Club Chicago podcast:
