Monday, December 6, 2021

Carding it for the week: Saga of the Dark Knight (Skybox 1994)

Art/ Rick Burchett

Art/ Rick Burchett

Art/ Rick Burchett

Art / Phil Jimenez

Art / Mike Mignola

Art / Mike Mignola

Art / Matt Wagner

Art / Matt Wagner

Art / Kyle Baker

Art / John Bolton

Art / John Bolton

Art / Jim Aparo

Art / Graham Nolan

Art / Dave Dorman

Art / Brian Stelfreeze


It’s another busy week, so that usually means a lot of images and very few words at the Tearoom of Despair, and who am I to mess with a tradition like that? (If you want a lot of words, I just did almost 3000 of them about how much I like Evan Dorkin's comics for the most excellent NeoText Review website and you can read them all here.)

This week, it’s nothing but art from Marvel and DC trading card sets from the mid-90s. I went through a very brief period of collecting comic book trading cards from that time, and they were almost all from the big two – there would be the odd few packs of the Bone or Judge Dredd sets, but these didn’t have much in the way of original art (although there was some lovely re-coloring). The ones with brand new art were always the real draw. 

I fucking loved Jim Lee’s X-Men and Mark Bagley’s Spider-Man, so I was down for the new art they did for trading card sets, I found out about more details of Vertigo comics I couldn’t find from the 1994 series, and some of them I just got because I really liked the variety of art on this tiny, shiny pieces of cardboard 

There were a lot more trading card series after this brief dalliance with them, but the quality dropped precipitously, with lots of Hildebrandt Brothers rip-offs (or, even worse, the brothers themselves), and this was as far as I go. And some of that art, even in that tiny package, still shines and it worth highlighting all these years later. It's not a complete list of all the good trading cards, just the ones I liked the most. 

Normal service should resume next week, but who fuckin' knows?

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