Day: September 16, 2003

Experiments with the African mail

looky

I’m trying to send a comic book to Primrose, who is in the Peace Corps in Togo. However, as comic books go, it’s a big one- it’s the collected version of Box Office Poison, a character-driven “reality” comic book about 20-somethings living their bohemian lives in New York. It’s pretty good, but it is basically a complete soap opera… so the collected edition is pretty thick- 3 inches at least.

The thing about sending packages to Africa is they almost never get there. If your package looks valuable, it will get opened and stolen and sold. If not, it might just get forgotten. Primrose warned us not to send us anything worth stealing, but she sure would like some comics. So here’s hoping it makes it to her! UPS wanted over $100 to send it air mail, so I think it’s going by the good old fashioned US Postal Service.

In a related story, danh and some friends mailed a 30 pound box of comics and candy to Pakistan- danh took special care to black out all the scandalous scenes in the comics Pakistani censors might object to. They paid over $100 to ship it… it’s now three years later and it never got there.

Not that it has to be on a different continent to get lost in the mail- Once I mailed Rachel a bunch of Hate graphic novels at work, but I addressed them to an alias she was using at the time. She had forgotten to tell the receptionist about this… poof! About $60 in comics lost forever. She even went to the lost & found but they had completely vanished.