Swedish cartoons become stamps in conjunction with Comic-Con at Bokmässan

Every year there's a book-trade fair (or Book-con if you will) in Gothenburg, Sweden. This year the Swedish post are launching stamps with Swedish cartoon characters on them in conjunction with the trade fair.

Eight toons were honored with their own stamps and Miami ad agency conceived of non traditional ad channels to get the word out. Since the client is the Swedish post, street arting the mailboxes with the characters was a given. Aside from invading mailboxes a la street-art, the toons were also spotted running off the funny pages and people wearing sandwich-board stamps patrolled the city of Gothenburg. (inside)

No mailbox was safe from the invading toons, all over the city of Gotherburg you'll find these. The plan is to also do some tailored stunts and decorate mailboxes in Stockholm and Malmö as well.

Comic strips that are now available as stamps: Arne Anka (Charlie Christensen), Socker-Conny (Joakim Pirinen), Assar (Ulf Lundkvist), Ensamma Mamman (Cecilia Torudd), Hemmingsson (Nina Hemmingsson), Hälge (Lars Mortimer), Rocky (Martin Kellerman), and Svensk Manga (Åsa Ekström).

Running below the usual strips in the newspapers are also these ads, where the characters announce in their trademark way that they're on their way to the trade fair. Arne Anka, a cynical version of Donald Duck (and C&D by Disney in the past for looking too much like him) glumly moans that he's wandering to the fair. Arne Anka had plastic surgery after the Disney debacle in 1988 and called himself Arne X. But after a few months with his new look neither the character Arne nor his readers could get used to the new look so Arne bought himself a fake duck-beak at a toystore and went back to looking like his old self, albeit with a tell-tale string revealing the mask. Arne's creator has an identical plastic duck-beak mask in real life in case Disney comes knocking one day. So far they haven't.

And here's what these ads looked like in situ, on the funny pages in newspapers.