A Trade Package From Twitch Part 1 of 2

In a time when my spending is completely halted as far as cardboard is concerned trade packages have become a welcome distraction of sorts. I still have the fun of ripping a package open, flip through cards and organize them. My most recent package has come from Twitch, AKA Lonestarr.

It was an amazing package that includes Mariners, Seahawks, Sonics and comic cards. All my favorite things. There were well over 100 cards so I cannot cover them all but here are some of my favorites beginning with the comic cards.

There were quite a few Marvel cards with my favorite Marvel movie being well represented; Guardians of the Galaxy. Rocket Raccoon is my favorite Marvel character and is one of my secret PCs.

When I got back in to collecting in the early 1990s I only collected sports cards but I was talked in to checking out comic cards by my best friend and he introduced me to the early Impel sets, this 2015 Fleer Retro took me back.

Next up is the DC Universe with some 1995 Skybox DC Legends and 1996 Skybox Firepower Outburst. The 1995 DC Legends is a chrome set, here are Count Viper and The Baron and the 1996 Skybox Firepower Outburst is embossed.

There were not many basketball cards but the ones that are included are perfect for my collection. The first one is a 1994-95 Flair Steve Kerr, who is one of my secondary PCs.

One of the best Sonics ever, Gary Payton, and one that would have been one of the best if the team wasn’t stolen, Kevin Durant.

Since the card had a printing error, it appears that someone accidently put the team name and logo of a fictional team on the card, I fixed it.

A pair of Seahawks QBs rocking the Elite design; 2007 Donruss Elite Hasselback and 2015 Panini Elite Russell Wilson.

Shaun Alexander has been my non-QB favorite player for the Seahawks and Paul Richardson has potential but has taken off yet as a receiver but I do dig the 2014 Topps Fire designs.

I close with a 1938 Churchman’s Boxing, these cards are from England and I have a partial collection but I did not have this Harry Mizler so this was a great vintage addition.

Recent eBay Pickup

This was a recent eBay pickup; I have been looking for a Marvel Comic Panel card since Upper Deck included them in the 2011 Marvel Beginnings release. Prices for the Marvel panel cards tend to end up in the $30-50 range for generic panels and ones including major characters or important events demand a premium, sometimes even going for hundreds. Being a collector on a budget I have been watching for a Marvel panel card that is in my price range and have missed out on a couple on last minute sniper bids.

 

Last year Breygent joined the party and began including Comic Panel Cards in some of their products as well as in packs created for the San Diego Comic Con. Books that they have used comic panels from are Dead World comics, Red Sonja, Vampirella, Warlord of Mars and most recently, Transformers.

 

These cards are all 1/1 and contain a scene panel cut out of a classic comic book attached to the card and framed similar to Upper Deck’s old Masterpiece inserts.

 

I don’t read Dead World but when I came across this premium panel from the front page of a Realm of the Dead comic book for $10 I jumped on it.

 

How much cooler can a comic panel get?

Three Zombies…check

Punk Rocker Zombie…check

Frank Sinatra (looking) Zombie with disembodied head… check

A Topless Zombie Chick…check

Spider-Man Posters Are Swinging My Way

In January Rittenhouse released the Spider-Man Original Animated Series Lenticular Motion Trading Cards set, at the time Rittenhouse was selling the 11 card set (9 lenticular cards plus 2 autographs) for a whopping $100, which is way more than what I was willing to spend. I had assumed that people would be selling the 9 lenticular base card set for $10-20 within a week of the release, boy was I wrong. People are selling the complete 11 card set; it appears that nobody is breaking up the set to sell the Paul Soles autographs separately. I find myself in a predicament; I can either wait until someone sells the base cards alone or dig in and pay $95-100 for the set, something I would rather not do.

 

I have found myself looking for cool Spider-man alternatives that are more reasonable in price, I have been keeping an eye on some Spidey cards and a handful of sketch cards but I came across something that may actually be a nice addition to my Spider-man collection, comic book cover posters.

 

The poster that caught my attention and brought me to the site was The Amazing Spider-Man #70, which was part of a Kingpin story line and includes the first appearance of Kingpin’s wife Vanessa Fisk. Issue #70 in a nice condition can run $20 or more so a movie poster sized vintage comic book cover rendition for a similar price is pretty fair. I don’t normally post about companies but when it comes to cool items I figure I can bend the rules a tad.

What is even better is that there are quite a few comic book covers including Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, X-Men, Thor, Iron Man and the list goes on, there are even some odd ball covers like Weird Tales, Yellowjacket Comics and Charlie Chan. I spent at least an hour going through the pages, I think I may have found a new type of collectible to add to my super hero collection. I already have a Machete movie poster above my computer, I think a couple of Spidey and Green Lantern comic book posters would be perfect bookends around it.

A Pack From The Past- Bloom County Chromium

I was going through some of my storage boxes looking for a set I collected in the 90s that I planned on writing about, I found the cards I was looking for but I also found a handful of long forgotten packs that I had opened around the same time and stored them all together.

 

Sometimes you forget about some of those sets that came out in the 90s when companies were setting the printing presses to high speed and it seemed like every guy with access to a printer was creating card sets hoping to cash in on the gold rush.

 

Being a child of the 70s & 80s I spent my Sunday mornings reading through the comics. The one section a kid could pull out of a newspaper and for one day feel like an adult, reading “our own” newspaper. Bloom County was a favorite, once I finally began to understand Berkeley Breathed’s humor I felt grown up. Breathed often covered subjects you would not expect from a comic strip like politics, culture, depression and mental health, war and even death and religion. His strips ran the entire decade before he decided to stop but then he moved on to Outland, which was a spin-off but a little more outlandish in the environment.

 

One company that jumped on the popularity of Bloom County and Outland, Krome Productions, created a set based on the storylines from the comic strips. The cards were chrome, obviously, and seemed almost random. The set contained a 100-card base checklist and two inserts, Holochrome and Stickers. There were actually subsets within the base set, multiple cards that would follow a certain theme (like Photos from Milo’s Scrapbook), multi-panel cards and puzzle cards.

 

 

The Holochrome cards were strikingly similar to Topps Finest cards and each contained one of the main characters from the comic strip. I did not pull any of these inserts, this image was pulled from eBay.

The stickers were a parallel of the individual base cards but not of the multi-panel or puzzle base cards. As best as I can find there are roughly 60 stickers. The stickers were also chrome but they were thinner than the base cards and the backs contained “Bloom County Outland” multiple times down the back instead of the standard base card back.

 

The set was released in 1995 and even though the packs are marked as “Premier Edition!” this was actually the only product released. You can still find boxes and individual cards selling on eBay with boxes running around $35-45 on average, most base cards sell for a couple of dollars and the Holochromes and Promo cards a little bit higher.

 

I picked up this pack in a dollar bin at a card show at the Tacoma Dome in 1999, back when card shows were still relevant to the hobby and there were hundreds of dealer tables and thousands of collectors working their way from table to table. This was the last show that I attended; I dragged my pregnant wife (bad call) and met the Product Manager from Pacific Trading Cards who helped me ID a Steve Largent card I pulled out of a pack a few years earlier that was not supposed to be packed out. Pacific was headquartered out of Lynnwood, about 45 minutes up I-5 from Tacoma. She invited me to take a tour of their offices and warehouse but sadly I never was able to make it work with my schedule.

 

Here is what the backs looked like, the vertical backs had a slightly different coloring than the horizontal backs but they otherwise were the same.

 

Upper Deck Hits A Marvel Comics Homerun

Growing up I was as much a super hero fan as the next kid. I loved Spider Man above all but I would not consider myself to be a comic book collector. For nostalgic reasons I still enjoy comic cards though. Recently Upper Deck released 2011 Upper Deck Marvel Beginnings set, a pretty typical comic card set consisting of 180 card base set along with the staples like sketch cards, autograph cards and hologram cards but what is getting the most attention is what was not included on the sales sheets, the “Ultimate Panel Focus” insert set. A set consisting of panels cut from classic comic books including Spider Man, the Avengers and Daredevil.

 This insert set contains panels cut from original comic books and inserted in to a card in a similar fashion to a cut signature. When you look at them you realize that this is a perfect marriage of cards and comic books. There are 10 cards on the checklist, 8 Spider Man, 1 Avengers and 1 Daredevil version and they are all limited to #/68 or less.

The only downside is the sepia-tone borders, with the yellowing newsprint the cards look washed out. I think either a solid black or a classic black and white border would have worked well in this case; the panel would become the center of attention.

A couple of the Marvel Ultimate Panel cards have begun to show up for auction but with prices well over $100 I do not see any of these cards making their way in to my collection any time soon. Now the cards all priced over $100 are BIN so I guess as more show up for auction we will be able to gauge a realistic price.

The checklist provided by Upper Deck:

Card Number	Comic Title	Issue #	Numbering
UM-1	The Amazing Spider-Man	2	66
UM-2	The Amazing Spider-Man	4	53
UM-3	The Amazing Spider-Man	6	61
UM-4	The Amazing Spider-Man	9	68
UM-5	The Amazing Spider-Man	14	66
UM-6	The Amazing Spider-Man	18	51
UM-7	The Amazing Spider-Man	25	45
UM-8	The Amazing Spider-Man	50	39
UM-12	The Avengers	57	50
UM-13	Daredevil	181	55