So here I am with the reason for our week, the hit show "Stranger Things", which is being celebrated by the latest Royal Mail postage stamps. Now I have never watched it, and probably never will, but a reader has sent in a description which I much appreciate (and you will, too, when I tell you we almost squeezed another X Files set in and ended with Battlestar Galactica).
This card is ostensibly a postcard from Hawkins, Indiana, and that is the small town where the action takes place. That action started with just eight episodes, set in the 1980s, which started on Netflix in 2016, and is now on season five. The story is that Will Byers goes to see a friend and never comes home. His mum and brother go hunting for him, without success, and his friends also start to get involved, along with the local police force.
At the same time, more or less, that he went missing, a girl appears at a local diner. She is called Eleven, from the tattoo on her arm, and it is revealed that she not only has strange psychic powers, but she was formerly the property of the Hawkins National Laboratory, the cover for secret government experiments. And she manages to contact Will Byers, who has been removed to a very dark place called Upside Down, which is inhabited by vines and monsters, including something called the Demogorgon. In fact Upside Down is a wormhole which was created by Eleven, and it connects the Earth with the Abyss. It also has breaches, which allows a Demogorgon to come to the Earth, through the laboratory, and steal one of the teenagers. Four seasons later, more tattooed children have been discovered, the humans are growing up and discovering each other, and the Soviet Union are found to have a secret base beneath the local shopping mall, which burned to the ground, with several residents, in what became known as the Battle of Starcourt Mall. And along came an even worse monster, who the teenagers called Vecna in homage to a character in Dungeons and Dragons.
The fifth series is said to be the last, but there will be an animated series and perhaps a film.
The first card was a promo and it was given away at the New York Comic Con. That showed some of the cast and promised that the cards were coming soon at a store near you. Those cards were issued in October 2018 by Topps, as a set of a hundred base cards showing scenes from the series, plus . There were also character cards, character stickers, scene stickers, autograph cards, each available with five different coloured borders, costume relic cards, printing plates, and another set of a hundred cards showing the realm of Upside Down - and if you bought a whole box you were guaranteed to get a commemorative patch. You can actually also collect the base set with a different border, in the design of a waffle, and these are very sought after. As to why the waffle, they became Eleven`s favourite food after she left the laboratory and was taken in by the town. In fact they were Kellogg`s "Eggo" waffles, a bit of more than subliminal advertising.
The second series was released in 2019, and in 2020 there was another batch of autograph cards. Two years later, Panini joined in with a set of 168 stickers, and two new manufacturers, also entered the scene - YuMe Toys, whose packets contained five cards and a sticker - and Zerocool, whose cards started out as being art drawn, amazingly well, by someone called Butcher Billy, but would later move into actual stills from season four.
Then, in 2023, along comes Kelloggs, who printed cards to be cut out on twenty-four count boxes of Eggo waffles. These were a true package issue, and had no wording on the reverse.
In 2025 Topps re-entered the Stranger Things Universe, under a new brand called "High-Tek" - these cards have rounded framing and the backdrop behind the characters are patterns.
Our cards actually come from 2019 and are part of the sub-series called "Welcome to the Upside Down". They are numbered as HWK-1 to HWK-15, and show scenes on the fronts with mock postcard reverses. The checklist for this set is :
- HWK-1 Melvald's General Store
- HWK-2 Hawkins Middle School#
- HWK-3 Hawkins High School
- HWK-4 Benny's Burgers
- HWK-5 Castle Byers
- HWK-6 Hawkins National Laboratory
- HWK-7 Hawkins Police Station
- HWK-8 The Upside Down
- HWK-9 The Gate
- HWK-10 Hawkins Public Library
- HWK-11 Wheeler House
- HWK-12 Palace Arcade
- HWK-13 Merrill's Farm
- HWK-14 Hopper's Cabin
- HWK-15 The Junkyard