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Stamp Out Monsters!

In the 1950s and 1960s, when I first saw the movies that I now write about, some of the most popular hobbies for boys were building and painting plastic models, collecting baseball picture cards and collecting stamps. The movie monsters invaded the domains of toy models and picture cards decades ago. Over the past few years, the monsters have been turning up on stamps from all over the world. The great surge came during the horror centennials of 1997, but the flow has never really stopped, and a tally of what stamps are out there may be timely. But first a little history on how the once-staid world of stamp collecting invited the monsters in.

As anyone old enough to remember knows, stamps of 50 years ago could be rather dull: as often as not somber portraits in muted tones of persons long dead. One of them was Edgar Allan Poe, on an American 3-cent stamp issued in 1949, the centennial of his death. This stamp is still easy to find, and still surprisingly cheap. More pricey is the next stamp devoted to a “horror” figure, Vlad Tepes, the historical Dracula, issued by Rumania in 1959. Vlad appeared again on a Rumanian stamp, for the last time to date, in 1976.

Mr. Hyde appears on a 1969 Samoan stamp in a set celebrating Robert Louis Stevenson. This was as close as to popular horror as the stamp world then cared to venture. The next horror stamp would not be for more than 20 years.

Those decades saw a great upheaval in the postal world. The monopolies of the national postal services yielded to new technologies and new businesses. Their wake-up call came from the telephone companies. Even in the 1960s, a “long distance” telephone call was seen as a costly indulgence reserved for holidays and announcements of births and deaths. With the breakup of Ma Bell and the plummet of long distance rates, the middle class could call instead of write. Federal Express and the other overnight carriers gave mailers the same type of alternative. By the 1980s—even before the internet and cellular phones took hold—the US Postal Service, Royal Mail in Britain and other aloof national postal regimes were looking to replace lost revenue. They then discovered what their counterparts in third-world countries had always known: easy money was to be made not only from stamp collectors, but from all kinds of collectors.

Even the smallest of countries and quasi-independent territories are equal to the great superpowers in one sense: they alone can legally issue stamps bearing their names. In the 1960s, while the national postal services still reigned supreme, the tiny post offices of such “states” began putting their names on stamps covering a vast variety of topics, few of which had any relation to the so-called issuing country. Few ever touched the soil of their native land—they were specifically designed to attract collectors, and went directly from manufacturers’ mints to stamp dealers. Stamps on topics ranging from the popes to baseball players to cartoon characters flooded the market. Even some ardent collectors of such stamps had only a vague notion of the location of places like “Ajman,” “Bhutan,” “Iso,” and “Staffa.”

These often colorful, freewheeling “topicals” divided the stamp-collecting world into bitterly opposed camps. The traditionalists dubbed them “wallpaper stamps”—not real stamps at all. To be “real,” a stamp had to be sold at its face value in the post offices of the issuing country. Not so, countered the lovers of the new stamps: a nation had the sovereign power to issue its stamps as it pleased. Traditional stamp collecting is by country, and in the 1970s those who collected by topic had to wade through unindexed lists of stamps grouped by nation. By the 1980s, the action had moved to topicals, and the postal services of the major nations wanted a piece of that action. Their world was now ready for the heroes and monsters of popular culture monster stamps.

In 1993 Great Britain made the plunge with a series of five Sherlock Holmes stamps. These proved wildly successful. A year later, Lon Chaney, Sr. became the first horror movie icon to be on a stamp, in the USA’s “Stars of the Silent Screen” set. In 1995 British stamps celebrated the science fiction novels of H. G. Wells. Wells, a perennial critic of the British government through the first half of the 20th century, is apparently still unforgiven, for he did not get on the stamps (and still has not been on a British stamp).

1997 saw the centennial of the publication of “Dracula” and “The Invisible Man,” the 150th anniversary of the birth of Bram Stoker, the bi-centennial of Mary Shelley’s, the 40thanniversary of Hammer’s first gothic horror film and the 80th anniversaries of the London and Broadway premieres of the stage version of “Dracula.” Celebrations of horror in popular culture included stamps from five countries.

The British stamps commemorating Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll & Hyde and the Hound of the Baskervilles were, to put it bluntly, a disaster. Royal Mail decreed that the images not resemble any person, living or dead. The final designs—which look like faces painted on garbage cans—do not; nor do they evoke any reader’s or viewer’s mental picture of the immortal monsters. So unpopular were the stamps that a rejected design submitted by Spitting Images was circulated “underground” to show what the stamps might have been. “Dracula” stamps from Ireland, birth place of Bram Stoker, fared only slightly better. The images are photographs of a model wearing exaggerated fangs and widow’s peak. Canada’s horror featured artists’ sketches of a vampire, werewolf, ghost and goblin.

A shocking oversight is that British and Irish stamps chose to feature hokey-versions of the characters, rather than the authors who created them. In 1994, Nuie Island issued commemorative stamps for the centennial of Robert Louis Stevenson’s death. But in his home country, Stevenson like Stoker, Shelley, Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle has yet to appear on a stamp. Stoker finally appeared on a Rumanian stamp in 2004.

Horror fared better in the USA’s “Classic Movie Monsters” stamps of the Chaneys (as The Phantom of the Opera and The Wolf Man), Karloff (as Frankenstein’s Monster and The Mummy) and Lugosi as Dracula. They delighted everyone, including the British. The American stamps are almost matched by the Sierra Leone “Hollywood Horror Classics.” These are on a sheet of 9: Chaney Sr.’s Phantom; Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man (with Evelyn Ankers screaming in the lower corner); Lugosi’s Dracula; Karloff’s Mummy; Frederic March’s Mr. Hyde; Charles Laughton as Dr. Moreau; Lionel Atwill in “Mystery of the Wax Museum;” Vincent Price in “The Haunted Palace;” and Elsa Lancester as the Bride of Frankenstein. With the sheet comes a separate “sheetlet” with Boris Karloff in “Son of Frankenstein.” On the border of the sheetlet—not actually on the stamp itself—is Bela Lugosi’s Ygor.

The great monsters continue to pop up on stamps: Godzilla on a 1998 Guinea stamp; King Kong on a 2003 stamp from Kyrgyzstan, and dinosaurs from “The Lost World” and “Journey to the Center of the Earth” on 2002 stamps from Liberia. Dorian Gray is on Ireland’s 2000 commemoratives of Oscar Wilde; Mr. Hyde on Nuie Island’s 1994 commemoratives of Stevenson, and Frankenstein’s monster (an artist’s conception, not a movie scene) on millenium stamps from Palau.

Lately science fiction has become a growing theme on stamps. Before Great Britain’s Wells stamps of 1995, about the only science fiction issues came in a set from Guinea in 1978, on the 150thanniversary of Jules Verne’s death. Since 1995, science fiction has been celebrated on stamps from Israel, San Marino, Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, and St. Vincent & The Grenadines.

The Lugosi-Karloff wars continue in the stamp world. By the end of 1997, Karloff had appeared on four stamps (two from the USA, two from Sierra Leone) versus Lugosi’s two (one from each country; he gets no credit for being on the border of Sierra Leone’s “Son of Frankenstein” stamp). Lugosi surged to the lead in 1998 with 10 stamps in Chad’s “Bela Lugosi as Dracula” set (again a sheet of 9 and a sheetlet of one). Karloff added one in 2000 as part of the Congo’s “Great Artists of the 20th Century.” Chad included a movie poster of “Dracula”—with Lugosi prominently displayed—among its millenium commemorative stamps. Karloff appears in the USA’s “American Film Making Behind the Scenes,” issued in February 2003 and a 2004 stamp from Guyana of the movie poster of The Mummy. Thus, the score now stands at Lugosi 13, Karloff 7.