Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Discuss: Trading Cards






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24 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, I had those wonderful old Batman cards when I was in elementary school and the show was big... Had no idea then they were painted by Norman Saunders, the pulp cover artist... but then, i those days i had no idea there'd ever been such a thing as a pulp magazine... ;)

January 31, 2012 at 6:07 AM
david_b said...

Ah, yes.., 'those days'. You wander into a rare store selling cards back in the day, and they'd all be selling baseball or football cards. You mention non-sports cards like 'Batman'? and they'd think of the cheap Three Stooges stuff and you'd be laughed out of the store. If you ran into another kid with a cool non-sports card you dreamed of having (like a Trek one), it was typically already ruined by his bicycle spokes.

The Batman card shown is cool, but I loved even more the Robin card which came after. It gave me much grief when the Mego Robin still had those silly cowlick and didn't measure up visually. Just a STUNNING line of cards ~ You can tell Saunders really took long hours to do these. ALL his cards are simply stunning works of color and dramatic layout.

Back in the early 70s living in farming communities, I only had a dozen Bat cards in my hand-me-downs of football/baseball cards of folks I never heard of/had NO interest in. By the time I moved into town, I had all the Space:1999 cards, then Star Wars (naturally). But it was the Bat cards I pined for most.

January 31, 2012 at 7:10 AM
Edo Bosnar said...

Personally I never really understood the whole trading card mania, from the best-known sports-related ones to the more obscure stuff (until this moment I never even knew there were Batman cards from the '60s). However, for a year after Star Wars came out, I almost maniacally collected the related cards that were sold with that little cardboard-like stick of gum. And then that phase passed, they all ended up pretty much forgotten in a shoebox until they were (I think) given away to a local church for a charity flea market together with the few Star Wars figures and Micronauts I had...

January 31, 2012 at 7:44 AM
dbutler16 said...

I've got some of what I would call random trading cards, such as Raiders of the Lost Arc and the ones from the Michael Keaton Batman movie, and Star Trek as well, but the only ones I really got into were the ones from the original trilogy Star Wars movies, baseball, and football. For years, I've had all of the Return of the Jedi cards (though not the stickers, I was never into them for some reason) but was missing maybe 3or 4 Star Wars cards and 3 or 4 Empire Strikes Back cards. Thanks for the wonders of ebay, I was able to complete both collections a few years ago.

Even though I like football more than baseball, I was more into baseball cards than football. Maybe because of the history or the cooler stats, I don't know. I still have most of my sports cards, but they don't really interest me that much any more.

January 31, 2012 at 8:19 AM
david_b said...

I've been impressed with the 1994 'Master Print' painting series by some wonderful artists, such as Jung Choi's Black Widow and Steranko's Nick Fury cover for SHIELD #4.

Some pretty impressive depictions.

January 31, 2012 at 8:41 AM
Karen said...

I loved the Marvel sticker cards when I was a kid. I was crazy about stickers in general, but those were great for decorating binders or those plain lunch boxes.

January 31, 2012 at 8:45 AM
Edo Bosnar said...

I'm with Karen on stickers - loved 'em. But like Karen, I never collected them, I just used them: stuck them on everything, from binders, folders, and notebooks to lunch boxes and those little tin candy boxes that were so great for storing all kinds of trinkets.

January 31, 2012 at 9:59 AM
Al said...

The door to my bedroom was covered with Marvel sticker cards. It was really cool until around high school, and my mom made me scrape them all off. I remember some of the captions were really funny, and some I just didn't get at all.

January 31, 2012 at 11:33 AM
Anthony said...

I never did collect super hero cards.
I had Kiss cards in the 8th grade back in '77. I still have those but not a complete set. I had Wacky Packages and some of a later knock off set. They are long gone. I loved Superman 2 so I purchased some of those cards and of course I kept anything comic or sci-fi related that came in Wonder Bread or on Hostess boxes.

January 31, 2012 at 11:37 AM
david_b said...

Is it just me, or is that Simpson's parody techno song 'Dr Zaius' going through everyone's head when you see that gum card..?

Not a huge Simpsons fan, but that send-up was awfully clever and catchy.

January 31, 2012 at 12:00 PM
Weird WWII said...

I only collected the demented ones like the Mars Attacks, Dinosaurs Attack and Garbage Pail Kids cards.

What can I say, I'm a sicko?
Brian

January 31, 2012 at 1:11 PM
Inkstained Wretch said...

I had a bunch of the cards from the original Star wars film. I collected them like crazy (along with the, ahem, "action figures" they sold as well.

Looking back on it, I'm impressed with how George Lucas was able to merchandise not just the stars of the film but every single "blink n' you miss'em" background character too.

It annoyed my folks though. They couldn't take me to the store without me begging them to buy latest pack of cards. "Don't you have enough already?" they'd moan.

I kept them all in a red wooden chest for a while. At some point my folks threw them all out. A small fortune was dumped into a groundfill somewhere in Connecticut.

January 31, 2012 at 1:21 PM
Doug said...

I dabbled in the various sticker sets, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, etc. cards from the 1970's. Like Inkstained, I never had a full set and that was due mostly to a lack of funds and/or regular means of purchasing them.

In the early '90's I did complete the first two Marvel series from Impel, the X-Men series from Skybox, the Batman: The Animated Series set, the Jusko ERB set (pictured), and the first Marvel Masterpieces set. Man, I didn't realize I had that many until I just got to writing it down! But like most things from the '90's, they are just in binders in my comic room and I wonder if I'll ever make back the money that was initially spent. I do treasure the Jusko and BTAS sets, but the rest are no sort of "ho hum".

The tpbs of the BTAS cards and the Jusko ERB art are far cooler, by the way!

Doug

January 31, 2012 at 2:11 PM
poisonelvis said...

I still have a whole set of the marvel sticker cards from the 70's,I bought two sets when i was a kid,one to keep,and one I coverd my dresser with(along with a bunch of other stickers)i wish i had the dresser still,but i do have my keeper set!!!!

January 31, 2012 at 3:08 PM
baab said...

poisonelvis---oh I am so jealous
my brother and i collected a Marvel sticker set each and we just stuck them on anything in our room,
Am i right in thinking this was the set that also gave you a card that would be part of a fantastic four cover once you collected about twelve,by Jack of course?

January 31, 2012 at 3:15 PM
david_b said...

Funny, irritating sticker collecting story..: I worked at a 'Woolco' back in '79, and actually purchased an entire box of individually-sold Galactica card packs, so I had nearly 3x of each card when I got home..

NONE of the packs had any stickers. Whaaat a rip. I saw the stickers later on in life and was quite bummed they weren't packed in.

I would have LOVED the Marvel stickers, but never knew they existed back in my day (early '70s..). No store I knew sold 'em.

January 31, 2012 at 3:21 PM
poisonelvis said...

hey on a side note,do you know what name the x-men poster(byrne)on your site is called(i'm trying to find it)or where and when they offered it? thanks -chuck

January 31, 2012 at 3:29 PM
William Preston said...

I had a host of those Marvel stickers. I think at first I just kept them in a pile, but then I stuck them on my notebooks. (I additionally had the Marvel folders.) My question is: Where the heck did I buy the stickers? (I'm not even sure where I got the folders.) Must I have bought them at a comic store?

January 31, 2012 at 3:56 PM
Doug said...

poisonelvis --

I've just done a couple of Google image searches on John Byrne + X-Men, John Byrne + X-Men Alpha Flight, and darned if I can find the original source of that very cool image. I made the masthead well over a month ago and saved the image to my computer. Regrettably, I have no idea where I got it!

My apologies,

Doug

January 31, 2012 at 4:52 PM
Anthony said...

http://thedorkreview.blogspot.com/2011/01/wanted-poster-john-byrnes-x-men-montage.html

http://marvel1980s.blogspot.com/2011/03/x-men-version-of-byrnes-1984-fantastic.html

poisonelvis

I don't know if this helps or not.

January 31, 2012 at 7:44 PM
Redartz said...

Fun topic! I too had all the Marvel stickers. They ended up thrown out along with my baseball cards (losing the 1970 Willie Mays still pains me). Long before the Marvel stickers, though, I recall the DC heroes on something called Superhero Foldees. They were a card in triptych form, with humorous pictures flanking the hero. You folded them from side to side to get different pictures. Anyone else recall these?

January 31, 2012 at 8:31 PM
Doug said...

poisonelvis --

Yep, that's it, and in fact I may have lifted it from that blog. Good finding!

Doug

And I'd take that or the FF poster in a heartbeat!

January 31, 2012 at 9:19 PM
Anonymous said...

I remember the Batman cards from 1966. Besides the painted ones, there was a series with photos from the TV show-Adam West as Bruce Wayne, West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin, Burgess Meredith as the Penguin. And I remember a classmate in second or third grade showing me those Foldees cards with the mix-and-match pictures and captions.

January 31, 2012 at 11:37 PM
Anonymous said...

i remember the batman photograph cards too, now that you mention them... i never got complete sets, but had a few of each. also king kong cards, beatle cards, superman tv show cards...

February 1, 2012 at 6:47 AM

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