Stars and Swipes: 30 Postcards of Awkward Americana

Wilhelm Staehle is the pseudonym of Will Staehle, a Seattle-based artist and designer. A former art director for HarperCollins, he has designed and illustrated numerous jackets for Michael Chabon, Michael Crichton, and a host of best-selling authors. Print magazine named him one of the Top 20 Under 30 New Visual Artists, and he exhibited a solo show of work at the Type Directors Club.

Here are 30 exquisite postcards from Wilhelm Staehle's Silhouette Masterpiece Theater (silhouettemasterpiecetheater.com). Each panel in the popular weekly web comic features a painstakingly detailed etching carved from a beautiful painting; the results are gorgeous and very funny. Stars and Swipes offers a hilarious vision of classic Americana, with farcical frontiersmen, prattling presidents, and other all-American oddities.