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Dune Cards

Thursday, November 19th, 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 🙂

Posted in Movies, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

Con Swag

Tuesday, October 20th, 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.

Posted in Art, Gamebooks, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys, Trading Cards | 2 Comments »

NYCC 2015 Day 1

Thursday, October 8th, 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:

We saw all sorts of amazing figurines…

We saw fine art, action figures and stuffed toys…

We saw amazing cosplay:

Really amazing cosplay:

Old toys…

And even an incredibly expensive pack of trading cards:

It was a long day, and even after 6.5 hours we know there’s still much left to see (not to mention panels etc.)

But day 1 was a big success 🙂

The giant Monster Hunter cat? That’s KLS’s birthday gift 🙂

Posted in Art, Books & Comics, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

Birthday Cards

Wednesday, May 20th, 2015

The other day I received a box of (belated) birthday gifts from my brother! Amongst other items, the box contained these:

With a big grin on my face I opened them all just now. Here’s what I found inside…

The Desert Shield cards (1991) chronicle the leading to the Iraq War of the early 90s. As you can see they are a tedious collection of military vehicle photos interspersed with publicity stills of ‘celebrities’ of the era. This is one of those sets that I am astonished has an audience.

I’ve never seen Rocky IV, but from the surprisingly detailed card backs I’m guessing it’s about a Russian boxer (Drago) who defeats an aging US champion (Apollo Creed) and is in turn defeated by Rocky. The cards are ho-hum, but I got a good sticker for AW!

That’s the entire contents of one of the E.T. sticker packs from ’82. It’s one of those album sets, but imagine how disappointed you’d be had you bought one pack and got these five! I wager had I not said, you’d be hard pressed to guess the movie they were from!

All I’m going to say about the above is it’ll look great on AW’s dresser 😉

The oldest cards are from Alien (1979) which makes the included gum 36 years old. Naturally I had to taste it…

It was strangely bitter, and incredibly hard, like a piece of plastic. It hasn’t aged well.

The cards themselves were decent (the usual promo shots) and as with many sets of the era the backs formed a puzzle. Strangely it had nothing to do with Alien:

The last pack was timeless:

Fun fact: as a child I used to glue trading cards into a big ‘scrapbook’! I suppose I never cared about the backs 🙂

What’s this?!? I forgot a pack:

For a set based on the eminently forgettable sequel to a very average film, these cards were surprisingly good!

1) The card backs are detailed and bilingual…

2) The print quality is high and the images shown are decent (although the cards are perforated as if they were hand separated!)…

3) And best of all the puzzle on the backs seems very cool!

However the pack lies when it says ‘A sticker in every pack’ since neither of mine had any sticker. Sorry Adam 🙂

Posted in Miscellaneous, Otaku, Trading Cards | 5 Comments »

Christmas Cards

Tuesday, December 24th, 2013

No, not those cards, these cards:

That’s a selection I obtained through my usual sources (ie. purchased at a Con). I was debating what to do with them for a while and since I’ve gone overboard with Xmas gifts already decided it was time to open them all. And so, in no particular order…

I recall having some of these cards before I ever saw the film. I think I was a bit scared of some of them actually, especially the alien ones. If I lived in the US I may have joined the fan club!

Gremlins was a bit of a phenomenon when it came out wasn’t it? And yet these days I only seem to recall the effect Phoebe had on me (and probably every other teenage boy that watched it). Looking at these cards reminds me I haven’t seen the film in 20+ years. I wonder how it has held up?

The Jaws 3D cards are as dreadful as you’d imagine, but the curiosity factor is certainly raised by the inclusion of a ‘3D viewer’. How good is the 3D effect? Well, using a bit of technomancy I can let you judge for yourself:

It’s almost like the shark is jumping out of the screen isn’t it? 😉

The Black Hole cards do an equally good job of making me want to see the film again, after 30-odd years. And who among you isn’t impressed by concept art stickers?!? But the most nostalgic part of these cards was actually on the back of the wrapper:

OMG! I remember this candy! I used to buy the coffin containers, and all the little pieces were bone shaped. Tasted terrible, but I loved the little plastic boxes 🙂

The Jurassic Park cards were very disappointing in their design, being less impressive by far than all the others. But to my excitement, the pack contained an incredible lenticular hologram card:

And even more amazingly, it’s a sticker! This is one of the most amazing chase cards I have ever seen, and I certainly didn’t expect to pull it from a $0.50 pack of 20-year old cards!

I guess Christmas came early this year 🙂

Posted in Art, Blog, Miscellaneous, Movies, Otaku, Time, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

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