Cool Passport Stamps

Round 2
Image 1 — "vagabond cat" : 3.40
The best-dressed desk in the round wrapped around the thinnest idea. The compass, the Paris photograph, the little mouse, the inked stamp lying beside its pad — the world around the passport is built with real care and the lamplight falling across it is lovely. But CAT-ALONIA and MICE-LAND are the very first joke this theme produces, and the two open pages repeat each other almost stamp for stamp, so the object at the centre of all that staging turns out to have the least in it.

Image 4 — "Santa's Global Passport" : 3.60
The funniest page and the least earned face. CHIMNEY CUSTOMS — CLEARED and SLEIGH SECURITY — ALL CLEAR are properly good jokes, the blue snow at the window against the amber workshop is a real colour decision, and the Departures board ending on "Every Child" is the one moment of feeling anybody found today. What costs it is that Santa arrives pre-loaded — the warmth is his rather than the picture's, and he crowds the very passport he is holding out to us.

Image 3 — "Time traveler's passport" : 3.70
The only one who realised a border can be a date. Jurassic Period, Ancient Rome, Moon Colony 2087, Mars Customs — swapping geography for chronology reopens a theme everyone else answered with a map, and the weathered hand, the brass watches and the lamp build a traveller you believe in. But the whole page is held at one amber temperature, so the stamps sink into the paper instead of stamping it; for a picture about ink on a page, that is the wrong thing to sacrifice.

Image 2 — "distant lands, long journeys" : 3.90
The only entrant who understood that this theme is a design brief, not a scene. No cat, no hands, no room — just the document filling the frame on the diagonal, and every stamp constructed the way a real one is: the arc of type, the emblem, the date, and one past-tense verb doing all the work. UNDERSEA KINGDOM · VISITED. LUNAR COLONY · LANDED. SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT & WIZARDRY · ARRIVED — the joke lives in the bureaucratic verb, which is a far better instinct than drawing a wizard would have been. The colour is the boldest in the round too: each stamp holds its own hue against a cream page that never goes muddy. The dates do not survive scrutiny and the title undersells it badly, but this is the page the other three were decorating around. My winner.