Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Font of Information

If you're interested in the art of lettering comic books, there are a number of articles and interviews over at Richard Starkings' Balloon Tales site. Of particular note should be this roundtable discussion in which a number of industry professionals discuss whether comics should be lettered in upper and lower case or ALL CAPS.

• Posted at 11:10 PM · LINK

Looney Opinions

According to this report, there are people out there who are complaining that the new Looney Tunes DVD doesn't include such fave WB cartoons as One Froggy Evening and What's Opera, Doc? This is a silly criticism, and one that I suspect is not as widely-held as the news report would have us believe.

• Posted at 11:10 AM · LINK

Stamp Correcting

Here at news from me, we wander from topic to topic. We started talking about the new Dr. Seuss postage stamp and now I'm printing the following from my pal, Rick Scheckman...

Another non-President who did not wait ten years to be on a postage stamp was Dag Hammarskjold. Dag was at the time of his 1961 death in a plane crash in the Congo, Secretary General of the United Nations. Very shortly after the crash, in 1962, The United States issued a stamp honoring Hammarskjold, however one sheet went in backwards for the second color resulting in a rare sheet of inverted stamps. Stamp collector Leonard Sherman purchased the sheet for $2 at the post office. When he announced the find, the government decided to print millions of the stamp error.

I remember this. Above, courtesy of Mr. Scheckman, we have the stamps in question. The one at left is the way the stamp looked when printed correctly. The one at right is the "error" stamp with the yellow plate inverted. But I just dug up a copy of the most memorable version, which is the one drawn by Al Jaffee for Mad Magazine...

• Posted at 10:34 AM · LINK

More on Stamps

A couple of folks have written to remind me that the U.S. Postal Service made an exception to their rule that a non-president had to be dead ten years to be on a stamp. The exception they all mention was Walter Elias Disney, who passed away in 1966 and had his mug on a 6-cent stamp just two years later. But actually, Disney hasn't been the only one. In 1948, the U.S. Post Office issued a stamp to honor the "Four Chaplains" who perished in 1943 aboard the ship, The Dorchester. Here's a link to a website that will tell you the story of this stamp. And here, we have a page on the procedures involved in deciding on a stamp, including the "ten year" rule.

Harry McCracken, whose website should be of interest to anyone interested in this one, also informs me...

Then there's the only person (as far as I know) who appeared on a stamp while he was still alive — legendary circus clown Lou Jacobs, whose clown face graced a circus-themed stamp in 1966. Apparently, the fact it was in makeup justified an exception. And no, I'm not a stamp collector — I'm just fascinated by this sort of thing.

So, obviously, am I. I wonder what the thinking was behind waiving the rule for Disney. They waited ten years for Robert Kennedy. They waited eleven for Dr. Martin Luther King. But Walt had to be right away?

• Posted at 1:37 AM · LINK