Comic Strips Get Stamps Of Approval Postal Service Expects Big Demand For New Line

If you walk into any Spokane post office branch on Thursday and find the postal clerks dressed as comic strip characters, don’t be alarmed.

They haven’t gone berserk or forgotten Halloween’s yet a few weeks away. They’re just celebrating the release of the U.S. Postal Service’s new line of stamp designs commemorating the 100th birthday of the comic strip.

The new stamps, featuring characters from 20 different comic strips, will go on sale Monday. The release of the stamps also kicks off national stamp collecting week.

You might expect to see standbys like “Peanuts,” “Dennis the Menace,” “Calvin and Hobbes” or even “The Far Side” to represent the collection.

However, the line of stamps spotlights the strips created during the industry’s first 50 years.

One of the stamps features the world’s first comic strip, “The Yellow Kid,” which was created in 1895.

A number of these strips, including “Gasoline Alley” and “Alley Oop,” are still read in newspapers today. “Blondie,” which also has a stamp, can be spotted on the pages of The Spokesman-Review.

A few of the stamps may be unfamiliar. “Little Nemo In Slumberland” completed its final run in 1927. “The Yellow Kid” lasted only three years and never ran after 1898.

On Thursday, postal clerks will be dressing the parts of the characters depicted in the collection. Post office lobbies throughout Spokane will be decorated in the vivid colors of the stamps all week.

“I have invited all the clerks in the city to be a part of that,” said Kathy Hamilton, the Postal Service’s customer relations coordinator. Hamilton said she might go as Little Orphan Annie.

According to Hamilton, philatelists (stamp collectors) have been salivating over the stamp sheet since it was unveiled in May.

“I was talking with Marvin Olsen, our philatelic clerk at Riverside Station, and he said that ever since the stamp had been unveiled last spring, he’s had customers coming in asking about the stamps, requesting the stamps,” she said. “He knows from that many people coming up to him that it’s going to be a very popular stamp.”

Popular indeed. The stamps are expected to sell out in less than a month.

Spokane residents will receive a special notice about the new line stamped on much of their intercity mail over the next couple of days.

On Oct. 12, some postal workers will don their costumes and visit the Shriners Hospital. The post office also is donating a mounted enlargement of the comic stamp sheet for an auction, benefiting the homeless school at the YWCA, on Oct. 15 at the INCON Science Fiction Convention at Cavanaugh’s Fourth Avenue.