2015 San Diego Comic Con Exclusive Princess Leia Set

Topps has been releasing quite a few products in non-standard sizes. It's kind of a shameless money grab, but they've got me a couple times so it must be working. For the San Diego Comic Con they released 10 sets of oversized 5x7 trading cards, with each set containing 10 cards in a specific theme. Once the convention was over Topps made the sets available online, which is where I got the Princess Leia set. Seven of the ten sets are still available on the shop as of this writing. I entertained the idea of getting all ten sets but I am not made of money and just chose the one to purchase. More recently Topps released another group of sets for the New York Comic Con. I haven't really looked into those at all, but it looks like they include some content from the upcoming Force Awakens film.

All of the cards have this same back on them. I assume that the other sets share this card back as well, but I don't know that for sure.

The cards don't break a lot of new ground as far as Star Wars photography, although I imagine by now it would be pretty difficult to find anything that hasn't already been seen without releasing a new film. I still think they are pretty cool. The Topps site says that not all of these photos were used in the original Star Wars card sets, though, so there is that.

Even though there are only ten cards in this set, they manage to cover most of the important situations Leia finds herself in during the classic trilogy. That's a nice cameo by Jabba the Hutt there in the card on the left.

Here is another cameo by Jabba. It's amazing that they were able to make a giant puppet so expressively sleazy. There are plenty of spots in the movies when the old-style special effects really show their age, but I haven't ever minded that much. It's kind of like professional wrestling in that the story gets so much better if you buy into it and use your imagination a little.

If you want to see the power of music in cinema, just watch the scene where Luke and Han Solo get their medals without the backing score:

Awkward! Almost as awkward as kissing your sister, huh, Luke? These cards aren't the type of thing I want to buy all the time, but I've picked up a handful of Topps' oversized offerings over the last few months. It's a pretty well-executed set even though the blue starfield border is getting kind of old at this point. Topps really needs to look into doing something else every so often.