Flat Stanley is a character from a real-life novel. He gets crushed with a bulletin board at night, which makes him as thin as paper hence able to fold himself, mail himself to his gramma and have his brother fly him as a kite. In the second grade Greg and his class each got a paper cut-out of him, which they had to color and send to a relative who lives far away and they have to take a photo of him in front of something. In The Long Haul, Susan takes a cutout with herself to take photos of it, but Greg doesn't like them. Susan had mailed it to her cousin Stacey in Seattle, who put him in a storage of newspapers and magazines where the cutout got lost. After that, the cutout never returned to Greg.