Card Collecting Part 1

The thing that got me into buying, reading, and collecting comics is cards. And what got me into cards was my brother Chad.

I had always been interested in superheroes and stuff, but I tend to be an “all-or-nothing” kind of guy. When I decide to pursue a hobby, I’m all in. Which can be good and bad. Good because I invest deeply into it and become well versed and knowledgeable, but bad because I look at the time/money/opportunity cost it would take to be fully committed to something new, and often decide that it’s not worth the effort. Unfortunately, it’s like I’m gate-keeping myself out of something I could possibly enjoy because I don’t want to do it casually.

In the case of comic books, I often saw them at convenient store or department stores. But the thing that made me shy away from them (besides the actual price) is the number 162 or 459, and by those I mean the issue numbers. See, I had this idea that a comic book was one long, continuous story (I mean, it IS) and that beginning in chapter Two-Hundred-Something meant that I had missed tons of relevant plot points and character interactions in those past issues so I would be lost.

What I didn’t know about comics was that there are often just 3- or 4-issue story arcs, and that it’s easier to “jump in” to a comic book at beginning of one of those. I also didn’t know that a lot of good writers often summed up important past continuity points for newer readers. Had I known that, I probably would have started sooner. 

The other main thing that kept me away was knowing that there would be more characters that I was unfamiliar with. For example, from the various animated series I could probably have named 4 or 5 Superman villains. But someone like Brainiac or a place like the bottle-city of Kandor were unknown to me, and I would be lost when those kinds of things came up in conversations/stories. 

Watching an animated series is a good way of getting to know major characters, and especially when they’re made for an audience who is unacquainted with most of the world those characters inhabit. In the case of the X-Men, I had just an inkling of who they were from some past animated series (I think I had caught Pryde of the X-Men or seen them on a Spider-Man and Friends episode or something) and seeing a friend draw Wolverine in class. But I was excited to see it on Fox Saturday morning cartoons. 

You can hear this picture. 

So I started watching the X-Men animated series somewhat religiously and immediately fell in love with the concept of mutants and the themes they presented. But I wasn’t quite to the level of wanting to buy the comics, because I knew that there were more characters and past stories I was unfamiliar with. 

What got my foot in the door, as it were, was the 1994 Fleer Ultra X-Men card set. Somehow Chad had ended up with a few of them and I saw them. These things were gorgeous; instead of the usual pen/ink comic book drawings, these were painted by many talented artists. I read the bios and character histories on the backs of the few cards he had and decided that completing this set was a worthwhile endeavor. 

I started helping Chad collect the set, and discovered that a few of my friends also were collecting these so I had some people to trade with. Slowly we filled up pages with cards, and because I had access to more money due to my paper route, I could fill in the gaps more quickly than Chad. Besides buying new packs at department stores, we made frequent visits to the local sports card shop. They had all kinds of things there, but one valuable resource was that we could buy singles for a quarter or less to acquire cards that we hadn’t been able to get because of bad luck in picking packs. I started to also familiarize myself with the necessary accessories such as plastic protectors, sleeves, boxes, and pages that held 9 cards in a 3-ring binder. My other brother Matt helped educate me on some of the finer aspects of these things, having collected many, many sports cards (mainly basketball) in previous years. 

Along the way we got a few of the special cards and eventually got the whole set. Once we had them all and I had devoured the information on the backs, I felt somewhat educated in the world and history of the X-Men. But I had also discovered that I liked collecting sets like these. Once we had a full set, the journey was complete, and I sorta felt disappointed that it was over so soon (and by soon, it had been like 7 weeks). 

 I decided to start again. I wanted my own set in pristine condition and with matching, new card pages in a nice binder. I took some of the doubles that I had collected and placed them accordingly, and then bought a bunch of new packs to get me started. The binder I chose had a clear pocket so I could slip a picture of whatever I wanted into it. I made a drawing of one of the special sets of nine cards that all made one big picture when put together and colored it. 

 But in addition to the main 150 card set, I decided that it would be fun to get all of the special cards as well. That was going to be more of an ambitious endeavor, as there were several sets of special cards which were immediately identifiable by their foil backgrounds. Most packs of 10 cards had a fairly good chance of having one special card in them. There were 40 in total, but only 34 of them were reasonable (though still difficult) to collect. Each special set had something like a one-in-five or one-in-seven chance of having a card in a pack, but getting the right cards together involved a lot more trading and buying from the card shop. Overall, I would say I had fairly good luck at getting the cards I wanted and only had to trade for a few of the ones I couldn’t find in packs or at the shop, but when I traded cards I tended to sweeten the pot for the other party so they wouldn’t regret making the trade with me. Finally at long last I had all the cards except for one – and it was one that could only be found in Wal-Mart packs (they had an exclusive deal with Fleer at the time). It wouldn’t be until around 2007 that I would finally track down that missing card with the help of eBay. 

There were 6 others that were foil versions of some of the regular cards, but they were only in 1:11 packs from Wal-Mart, and I could never find any. These days a full set of 6 goes for somewhere between $400 and $600 on online auctions. 

After completing the collection, I found that I basically had enough doubles to have another full set of regular cards (with only a few missing). I bought the necessary pages and binder for them and gifted them to my son Avery years later. 

Once I had this set and a few others under my belt, I felt well versed enough in the X-Men (and Marvel) comic histories that I started buying comics, but that’s a story for another post.


Card Collecting Part 2

Card Collecting Part 3