Royal Mail’s latest stamp series features the comic book heroes from Marvel Comics and they come with a pretty clever little twist! Alongside the standard sized stamps adorned with a whole host of heroes from the incredibly popular comics and movie universe, come some specially shaped ones that form a short comic!

From a design perspective this has us really interested. It’s a really clever use of the format, since stamps are already rectangles and are perfectly suited to become small comics panels, and it turns them into an immensely attractive and collectible item.

It’s an excellent example of bringing design and illustration together to repurpose something that has been around for a long time in a totally new way. It feels ‘right’ and we find it hard to believe that this hasn’t been done before!

Comic book artist Alan Davis who has worked for Marvel for over 30 years, is the artist responsible for drawing the art on the stamps. His work is colourful, dynamic and the art really pops off the small format.

As is the way with comics though, the workload is split into stages, with a different artist responsible for a different facet of the production:

• Penciller: designs everything on the page in rough but tidy pencil
• Inker: turns those rough pencil lines into clean blacks
• Colourist: adds the iconic bright palette to the page
• The letterer: who types out the text and adds the speech bubbles and caption boxes)

This way of working allows the team to work in parallel to meet the tight deadlines of modern comics.

We’re looking forward to these new stamps, any opportunity to add a bit more colour and character into the everyday is good by us, especially when there’s a little bit of design wizardry in there too! Excelsior!

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