As I tend to do I sat on this review for a bit too long. The reason for a double review is because Wilhelm Staehle’s Hugs and Misses & Stars and Swipes are essentially the same thing with different subject matters. Both are a series of postcards that display one image with a silhouette over the image and within the silhouette some clever dialogue. In the case of Stars and Swipes it’s a clever look at American history and while this has been aped online in other forms, the benefit here is one voice throughout. Hugs and Misses is about love or at least clever silhouettes playing on widely known references like “My eyes are up here” and so on.

Both books are a quick and fun read. There not really trying to get deep laughs from you, but a few of the gags might catch you off guard. They are a postcard book so really there’s no value in keeping them on a bookshelf to explore at a later date. The real question is whether you’ll actually send one of these postcards to someone? I don’t know the answer to that any more than I know the answer to the question “will you buy this for yourself?”

Both books are of high quality, but the fact that they’re not really a book book makes it hard to say if you’ll be purchasing these for yourself or perhaps receiving them as a gift. That seems to be its intended purpose… a random gift to be explored once.

With that, it’s not really worth scoring something like this. I mean the content isn’t exactly something that warrants a numerical value since the value comes from the mindset of why you would be it and the possibility of who you would give it to.

Creator: Wilhelm Staehle Publisher: Quirk Books Price: $9.95 each