Grumble all you want about the US Postal Service, but they do reach us six solid days every week of the year. Not always with the kind of mail we may like opening, but imagine our world without them. Not only without their service, but without their stamps. Those eye-popping little works of art we take far too much for granted...!
They constitute a happy spectacle that features our lands and monuments, our heroes and celebrities, even -- well, by gosh, even our comic strips. Right now they're featuring: Dennis the Menace, Archie, Garfield, Beetle Bailey, and Calvin & Hobbes. You can of course simply stick them on envelopes; but better still, you can take the time to enjoy how these comics catch the comedic cadence of American life:
* The perpetually five-year-old Dennis debuted in 1951. His innocent curiosity about anything and everything can drive his parents and neighbors a little nuts, but doesn't his happy mischief remind you of somebody very dear? That's right: You. In so many brings-a-smile-to-your-face ways, Dennis reminds us of us when we and America were just a little younger, and maybe simpler
* Seventeen-year-old Archie is the idealized American teen. Remember...? Happily torn between the haughty Veronica and sweet Betty, Archie eternally wanders through his high school years a composite of curious and clueless. Surely adolescence never was this simple, but it's still fun to think it was
* Garfield first strutted across the stage of American life in 1978 as the incarnation of everything feline. A self- centered, cynical, crabby tabby who allows his bachelor Jon Arbuckle to live with him. Garfield can say more about the human condition is just one small thought-bubble than most us us can in a spoken paragraph. Each day we're left to wonder why we weren't born a catered-to cat
* Beetle Bailey was drafted into the Army in 1950, and has remained the laziest GI in the service. But what he and his hassling sergeant remind us is that there really is a parallel universe to our own safe civilian one. And whereas with Beetle there are laughs, he continues to remind us that his army is what allows you and me to keep laughing
* Finally Calvin & Hobbes. Six-year-old Calvin and his inseparable tiger pal Hobbes ponder the mysteries of their world. Our world. And within just a few panes of brilliant comedic artwork, they seem to solve so many of them. Philosophy 102 with pictures. But unlike most cartoonists, their creator produced only from 1985 to 1995, leaving us to ponder all that his inventions once pondered
What an amazing world...! What an amazing variety of ways to study it....! What better way than by taking a second look at what you're sticking on that next envelope...!
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