At the annual Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, tens of thousands of visitors gather in their finest cosplay to commemorate the 1966 day that the “Mothman”—a 7-foot moth creature with bright red eyes—supposedly appeared from either the depths of hell or outer reaches of space to terrify onlookers. The festival is full of Mothman fans, for whom the legendary cryptid has morphed from a haunting specter to more of a lovable hero. Now, he’s getting his own official stamp.
On November 9, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) released an initial batch of stamp subjects for 2027. They run the gamut from traditional, subject-centric designs, like a stamp commemorating baseball’s Willie Mays, to designs aimed at a more artistic crowd, like a series of whimsical watercolor unicorns.
The “Mythical Creatures” collection is a lineup of five American cryptids—the Mothman, Jackalope, Sasquatch, Squonk, and Champ—each designed by Antonio Alcalá, an art director at USPS, and illustrated by Nat Power, a tattoo artist. They’re sure to please folk historians, stamp collectors, and Reddit users alike.
Meet Squonk, Jackalope, and Champ
Every year, USPS’s Citizen’s Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) restarts an intensive process of sifting through thousands of suggested topics from the public to land on the 20-25 new designs it recommends be produced. According to a 2024 USPS blog post, the final list has to be “uniquely American” and balance nods to topics like science, arts, history, and culture. The process leads to selections that traverse an array of genres, from Toni Morrison to Spongebob Squarepants.
The Mythical Creatures collection merges art history with American folklore. Its subjects are spooky, unknowable creatures that emerged in different regions of the U.S. The Jackalope is part of Wyoming legend after two taxidermist brothers created an antlered bunny in the 1930s; the Squonk is a Pennsylvania-based, pig-like cryptid whose main attribute of note is its constant weeping; and the Champ is a lake monster hailing from the Lake Champlain region in New York and Vermont.
The designs from Alcalá and Power take these myths and interpret them through the lens of American traditional tattoo aesthetics, rendering them in bold, dark lines with bright washes of color. The final products look less like the fare of an older letter-writing crowd, and more like the art you might find on the arm of a millennial who’s fallen down a few too many Reddit rabbit holes.
In the 2024 blog post, Joe Kelley, the CSAC chair and a stamp collector, explained that the multigenerational appeal is often the point: “We want to highlight what’s great about America. The hope is to not only draw more people to the hobby of stamp collecting, but also encourage people to simply use stamps. With so much emphasis today on the popularity of all things ‘retro,’ why not be retro yourself and write a letter?”