Category: Trading Cards

Dune Cards

November 19, 2015

You may recall I purchased the above last month at comic con. A full box of 36 unopened Dune cards from 1984. I never even knew the set existed, and the guy who sold it to me said he had a case of it!

I managed to complete the 132 card set in 25 packs, although with a bit of luck it could have happened in about 18. That’s very good collation, and there may even be two sets in the box.

The cards themselves are no nonsense, with a good quality picture on the front and lots of words – like the film itself – on the back. I reckon I wouldn’t have loved them as a kid though: not enough hardware or monsters.

The stickers though are amazing, and there is an incredible 44 of them! You won’t be completing this set in one box. However the passage of 31 years has had a distressing effect on the stick of gum, bonding it to the sticker on a molecular level. It’s essentially impossible to remove without damaging the sticker 🙁

Look at the lovely backs of the stickers, like tokens from some tabletop Dune RPG:

Lovely stuff.

Some of you will no doubt be mystified by my love of opening trading cards like these, but this Dune set checked all the boxes. I don’t even remember what I paid for it, but I’m glad I did 🙂

Con Swag

October 20, 2015

We bought a bunch of stuff at the con. Here’s a selection:

That’s issue 1 of a magazine that ran for only 3 issues back in 1967. It’s basically a girls romance comic with some ‘true love advice’ and articles about dreamy male celebrities of the era. Some guy was selling scads of all three issues of this, probably found in an abandoned warehouse.

KLS bought this disapproving cat plush. I think it’s disapproval is due to it being the smallest and cheapest plush we bought at the con 🙂

I got these 4 old D&D Modules for a song. To my surprise, one of them is a single-player version that uses invisible ink to hide the events! Only two squares in the entire book have been inked in. I wonder if the remaining ink still works?

Autographed Chris Achilleos art, now framed and on my wall. The guy I bought this from (I also got an Achilleos poster) knows the artist, and was telling me how friendly and gracious he is. He said he had another print somewhere in his voluminous stand, and I was hopeful for some FF or DW art, but alas he couldn’t find it 🙁

More art, this time a lenticular Miku poster. See how her blue matches the colour of my study wall! We bought a lot of art at the con, from posters to prints to autographed works. Much of it is already framed and up on our walls (or KLS’s office wall).

Speaking of Miku, here’s the con-exclusive Nendroid they were selling at the Good Smile booth. It’s super cute, and somehow ended up leaving the con with me 😉

KLS purchased this tiny ‘sea bunny’ resin figure direct from the artist. It is based on the recently discovered ‘sea bunny’ species of nudibranch slug, which looks like this:

So cute! We stumbled upon this fortuitously, since the artist was only there for an hour and only selling 25 of them. I guess he’s somewhat famous since the person in front of us was very excited and had some of his other stuff for him to autograph. He was friendly and seemed genuinely happy people were buying his stuff.

Last but not least, could this be the find of the show:

All 36 packs, unopened! A world of spice and worms and Gom Jabbers and Kwisatz Haderachs just waiting to be uncovered! Plus there are stickers too. Even though they are already 31 years old I’ll let them age a bit before eagerly ripping into all of them…

…unless you want a pack for your very own self? If so, let me know in the comments.

NYCC 2015 Day 1

October 8, 2015

That’s the sun rising in the fog as we rode the train to NY this morning for another (our 8th?) comic con. You know the drill by now, legions of people, otaku madness, great exhaustion, much excitement.

And so it started again!

We only had to line up for a half hour or so to get in, but the crowds are truly massive. Once inside it started off on a pretty high note, as I lined up to get my very own Yugioh token card made:

I think I nailed the pose didn’t I?

Usually seeing this piece of remarkable art made entirely of Jelly Beans would be quite a thing, but here it’s just one of an endless cavalcade of spectacles. One minute you could be checking out a display of costumes from the upcoming Warcraft film, next minute you could be digging through old comics or getting a wrestlers autograph and the next moment you could be shopping at a stand that only sold Star Trek merchandise: