Esteemed cartoonist Chris Ware is known for his detailed New Yorker covers and complex graphic novels featuring characters like Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown. But now, Ware’s work — featuring architectural details familiar to most Chicago-area residents — is going micro.
The 57-year-old Riverside resident has created a new sheet of 20 postage stamps, which will roll out July 23 and help to mark the U.S. Postal Service’s 250th birthday. The USPS was established in July 1775 by the Second Continental Congress with Benjamin Franklin as the first postmaster general.
The colorful collection of 20 interconnected Forever stamps depict, in extraordinary detail, a bird’s-eye view of a postal carrier on her daily route. The stamps, which cost $15.60 per sheet, tell both an individual and a collective story that progresses, top to bottom, through the four seasons of the year.
“I tried to organize them like little tiny New Yorker covers that have their gags,” Ware said. “That’s cartoonist parlance for having meaning.
“It’s sort of like a comic strip page. But in a comic, you’re used to seeing very clear demarcations of space with panels, and with this, it’s a little bit invisible, so I wanted to take advantage of that. The second you peel the stamp off, it suddenly would have a meaning to it.”
On one stamp, the postal carrier waves to kids at a rooftop barbecue. In another, she exchanges a piece of mail with a hard hat-wearing worker who is reaching up from a manhole. There are dogwalkers and parents, people writing letters and a stamp collector inspecting his collection.
It’s a whole world. And while the image shown on the stamps is not one place in particular, Ware did draw heavy inspiration from suburban Chicago.
“I spent a lot of time just walking around, taking my own pictures in Riverside and Berwyn and Oak Park,” Ware said. “So there are some little architectural elements there.” Those Easter eggs include a couple of Riverside’s famous gas street lights.
That “I spy” element was a part of this project from the start. Antonio Alcalá, a USPS art director, first approached Ware about designing a stamp in late 2023. Alcalá’s original idea was a design that placed pieces of USPS history throughout the cartoon. That idea made it into Ware’s final draft. Close observers can seek and find everything from a Post Office to a green drop box that stores mail to USPS vehicles from various generations.
But Ware also wanted to take things a step further, giving the collection the narrative throughline of the mail carrier interacting with the people and sights of her route.
“I wanted to try to empathize with what it was like to be a postal carrier. It seems like there’s a strange kind of repetition to it,” Ware said. “You’re tracing the same path every single day. You’re seeing the same kind of people, the same events, same spaces, yet time is passing at the same time.”
It’s a routine he has often gotten a glimpse of over the years, as someone who worked at home long before it was popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Being a stay-at-home, shut-in cartoonist — as many such cartoonists can probably understand — the delivery of the mail is sort of an exciting time of day for us,” Ware said with a laugh. “Other than my wife coming home from teaching, that’s my human contact for the day.”
Ware had never thought about his artwork being a part of the Postal Service. When Alcalá contacted him, Ware said his initial reaction was: “This will make my mom happy.
“This is the sort of thing that moms really really like, I think, if you get to do a stamp,” he said. “So I said yes.”
When asked how he feels about little pieces of his work being affixed to mail and shipped across the world, Ware nonchalantly said, “Honest to God, I haven’t really thought about it.”
But, he was right: It has made his mom proud. According to Ware, his mother’s mail carrier even left a note last week congratulating her on her son’s new stamp.
Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.