More Star Wars Goodness by John Soukup

John Soukup is an artist who features heavily in my collection, and back in November I picked up another one. Wow, November was a long time ago! I am pretty far behind on my posts, and I've got enough queued up to get me through the end of February. This sketch actually appeared in my Carrie Fisher tribute post, but I haven't yet posted about it specifically.

I believe this card comes from the Topps Star Wars: Journey to The Force Awakens set, but I am not 100% sure on that. There are a lot of Topps sets based on The Force Awakens, and because I didn't buy a lot of those products I am not intimately familiar with the variances in the sketch card stock used for them. But Journey to The Force Awakens is my best guess.

I am inclined to believe that this was the reference photo used for the sketch. I don't always seek out reference photos for sketch cards, but I thought that C-3PO hanging out in a dark background like that was a little unsettling, and I had to see if it came from a film scene.

There isn't a whole lot else to say at the moment. Today was kind of a wasted day. I slept in and didn't do much else. I spent the last two days at work moving furniture around, and it kind of wiped me out. We are getting a new supervisor on Tuesday, and we wanted to get everyone moved around before he starts work. We had to shuffle things between three offices, and then move all of the extra stuff into the tiny office that was left over, aka the new storage closet. I found myself involved in almost every furniture move, and I also spent a lot of time running the carpet cleaner. I don't mind physical labor, but I was tired by the end of Friday.

Leia Wooden Sketch Card by John Soukup

Here's another Princess Leia sketch I've had in my collection for a little while. I got it directly from the artist, John Soukup, through an eBay auction. I really ought to take a picture of this from the side, as the Leia portion of the card is a piece of wood that has been painted and attached to the card. It's a pretty cool piece of art featuring Leia in her classic bun hairstyle and white dress. I like the 3D effect that the wooden figure adds to the piece, although that doesn't really come through in the scan. He has done a couple of commissioned displays featuring groups of Star Wars figures in certain themes, like Hoth or Jabba's Palace. I found these images of them on a Rebel Scum forums thread:

More information on this set on the Mighty Jabba's Collection site!

If you click through the link in the caption on this photo you can see more detail on these figures, like the back of the Rancor! I really like the inclusion of Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

The ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi glows in the dark! I like the C-3PO, too. I think it's the eyes.

I've also seen some Marvel comic book characters that he has made wooden figures for. I think they're a pretty neat item. I'd like to commission a set someday, but it would be hard to decide what universe and which characters to ask for. It would also be really neat to add a full-size painting of his to my wall, but it would have to be the right piece and I'd probably need to save for a while to make it happen.

I was really glad to add another Leia sketch to my collection, and I was also very happy to get another piece done by John Soukup. It looks like he's updated his DeviantArt page a couple of times in the last few months. You can see some of his other stuff on there, like more of the wooden figures, some Star Wars tarot cards, some of his own creations, and a Wonder Woman painting that I can't stop looking at. I have a couple of other things done by him that I've been sitting on for a while because when I bought them I started thinking about the definition and meaning of art. That's a big subject and a blog post I may never be able to wrap my head around, so I might just do a regular post about the items so I can get them up on display.

Leia Sketch Card by John Soukup

I've had this card for quite a while, having won it from an eBay seller back in October. It's a sketch card of Princess Leia by John Soukup from the 2015 Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens set. You can see part of Jabba the Hutt in the background there, which leads me to wonder if this card has another piece out there somewhere. I haven't seen one, but I also haven't been looking very hard for it. I do have some pretty wide searches out there for Star Wars sketches and Soukup's work, so I would think that if one exists and comes up for sale I will at least see it.

Because I tend to sit and stew on things for months at a time, I have been thinking about how the world views Princess Leia's slave costume. It bothers me a little bit that people see the costume and say, "Oh! It's sexy Leia!" while ignoring that it is also a slave costume. It is a sexy costume, but it's not sexy because Leia felt like sexing it up that day. It's because Jabba the Hutt was a bad guy who enslaved people and dressed them up to humiliate them and show off his power. The scenes set in Jabba's palace are an important part of the Star Wars story in general and Leia's story arc in particular, and the costume deserves to be known as more than just the "Sexy Leia" costume. The costume is important in that Leia uses the chains that are a part of it to choke and kill Jabba while making her own escape. She is an active participant in the escape / rescue rather than just a damsel in distress waiting on someone else to save her. She overcomes Jabba's attempt to denigrate her and shows that she isn't defined by his attempts to control her.

Maybe I am overthinking this stuff, but as a husband and father I find myself looking at the messages that come into my home and the messages I send by my words and actions. Star Wars is going to be a part of my family's mythology, and the slave costume is part of that. I want to raise my kids to see female characters as more than eye candy. Leia is a powerful hero in the Star Wars universe, and taking a proper view of the slave costume as a symbol of Jabba's ill intentions allows the viewer to see Leia's strength and will to rise above the circumstances she finds herself in. I don't think that the slave costume needs to be whitewashed or removed from the movies. I don't deny that Carrie Fisher looks attractive in the costume. She is attractive in the other Leia costumes, too. But she also plays a character who exhibits strength, leadership, and determination. Physical attractiveness is just one of her qualities.

Sorry for the preachy post. I have conflicting feelings about the slave Leia costume and society's view of women, and I didn't just want to throw the sketch up here on my blog without some sort of commentary. I am not particularly qualified as a champion of gender politics, but I have been thinking about this stuff as I evaluate myself and the messages I send to my wife, kids, and the other people I interact with in life.

We still haven't seen The Force Awakens. It's hard to find five tickets side-by-side that aren't in the front row of the theater. It'll probably be next weekend before we get out to see it. A (former) friend of mine already spoiled the movie for me, so I figure I can wait another week to see it. The logistics of even simple things like going to the movies are much more complicated when you've got three young kids. The new Force Awakens set from Topps has added a new card to my want list, but the going price has this particular card up there in the White Whale category:

It's a sticker autograph, but that doesn't really bother me much. Time will tell if I eventually save enough money up and allocate it to getting a copy of this card, but it's the new top dog on my "If I Win the Lottery" list. It's currently trading at well over $200, so it's not one of those impulse-buy things for me. I definitely would like to add a copy to my Leia collection, though.

A Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens Sketch Card of Princess Leia by Robert Teranishi

I am still in Arkansas and I still have a poor internet connection, so again I've got a short one-card post. This is a Princess Leia sketch by Robert Teranishi from Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens. I think it's a pretty cool design, with a nice minimalist design. What I find less cool is that it's not really a 1 / 1, as there are multiple copies of essentially the same stenciled sketch card out there.

Here is a scan I pulled of one from eBay. It looks like maybe he used some kind of block printing or stenciling or something because all the elements are the same, but they line up just a little bit differently. You can see on my card that the black at the top of Leia's head runs into the red, but on this other card the edges match up a little better. There are a few minor differences, so I think maybe he stenciled the design and then filled in the inks by hand rather than using some kind of mechanical printing process.

In the end I still like the card, so it doesn't really matter that he did multiple similar sketches. Teranishi kind of has a reputation on the forums I read as a guy who cuts corners and reuses elements to increase the number of cards he gets into a product. If you do an eBay search for his name you can see many cards that use duplicate elements. He's not the only one who does it, as I mentioned in my Star Wars Masterwork box break. I guess if the payment structure is set up to reward quantity, you are going to have artists who take advantage of it.

Teranishi actually got widely panned for his Masterwork cards on the Blowout forums for a different reason. Instead of his usual stencil work that plays with negative space he did a bunch of faint pencil sketches for that product. I think the main problem is that the subtle differences in shading don't scan well, so they look worse in pictures than they do in-hand. But a lot of people seemed disappointed when pulling one of his pieces from Masterwork, although the price tag and some of the really crazy stuff that came from that product really set the bar high. A pencil sketch with no background really stood out when other artists were doing fully-inked and painted cards with full backgrounds. If you get a good scan of his sketches from Masterwork you can see that there is actually quite a bit of detail on them, but from a distance or on a poor scan it does look kind of like he drew an outline of the character and scribbled in some shading. I guess you could go either way on his work. He doesn't appear to have much of a web presence at all, so I can't link you to a gallery of his work or anything. It looks like he's done some comic book covers and maybe some interior pages as well over the last couple of decades.

Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens Mini-Master Set

Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer (Official)
The Force. It’s calling to you. Tickets on sale now: Fandango.com/TheForceAwakens
Posted by Star Wars on Monday, October 19, 2015

I bought a mini-master set of the recently-released Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens cards. I got the base set plus all of the common insert sets. Normally I probably would just buy the base set, but there were enough inserts I wanted from the set to justify getting the whole thing.

Most of the base card backs tell the story of the film depicted on the front, but the cards featuring scenes from the upcoming Force Awakens film have puzzles on the back that form big movie poster-style pictures when they are arranged together.

The set has 110 cards in it and features all the usual scenes from the films. I chose a few of my favorites to show here. The first 80 cards in the set recap the six already-released movies. They are printed on thick vintage-style cardboard and feature the same coloration and patterning found on the original card set from 1977.

Cards 81-110 feature images from the new film. Most (all) of them have been seen before in promotional material, but this set collects them together and adds captions to them, teasing the events from the movie but not really giving a lot away. One thing that kind of bothers me is the way the puzzle cards are included in the checklist. Each 9-card puzzle has another card after it that shows the completed puzzle on the back. The puzzle cards also start on card # 81, which would be the last card slot on the previous page if you are putting your cards in 9-pocket pages. You're not going to be able to store your set in 9-pocket pages while displaying the puzzles on the back without putting your cards in the pages out of order. If you put the cards in order, the puzzles won't display right. If you display the puzzles properly, the cards won't be in order. It's quite a dilemma for collectors.

This is a foil set that shows characters from the new movie. The back of the cards tells you to colelct all 9 cards in the set, but there are only 8 cards in the set. At first I thought maybe the seller had shortchanged me one card, but I dug around and all the internet checklists only list 8 cards. The only legacy character on this checklist is Chewbacca.

This Power of the First Order set shows some of the leaders, troops, and equipment from the movie's 'bad guys.' The back of these cards correctly lists the number of cards in the set at 8. You don't get any biographical information for the main characters or descriptions for the troopers and vehicles, so there's not a lot of content in this set as far as the new movie goes.

The Heroes of the Resistance set has the same formula as the Power of the First Order set. There are images of some new characters, some old characters, and the Millennium Falcon. Again, anything in the set related to the new film is limited to names and images.

The stickers are probably my favorite of the Lite inserts. There are a couple of other inserts that actually have some good text on the backs. Again, these are a throwback to the stickers found in the original Star Wars trading cards.

There are 18 stickers in the set. Although the base set contains a recap of the prequel trilogy, the inserts seem to focus entirely on the classic trilogy and the new movie. I'm not sure why Kylo Ren gets two stickers in this set.

This insert set doesn't really fit into the overall theme of the product, but it features various behind-the-scenes looks at the production of the original films. The card backs have fairly lengthy (for a trading card) write-ups describing some part of the production process. It's probably not any information you couldn't find elsewhere, but it makes for a good set. I think my favorite image is the one on the Lorne and the Sandcrawler card.

The Concept Art insert actually has some content from the prequel trilogy in addition to a horrible MS Word Art border and color scheme. This is an insert that would have benefited from a little lss border and a little more art. It shows the concept drawings for various scenes and characters from the films, with a write-up on the back of what the scene is and who did the art.

This is a pretty cool set overall, but it's obviously a money grab designed to feed off the hype of the new film. It's understandable that Topps couldn't spoil any real content from The Force Awakens, but it makes for a set that doesn't offer much new. Even the card designs are rehashes of stuff that's come before. I was going to pick up the set one way or the other, but I'm glad I bought a cheap set online rather than busting boxes to build it.

Another Awesome Interactive Sketch Card by John Soukup!

I picked up another cool interactive sketch card from John Soukup. The last one I featured was a lift-the-flap style card from Adventure Time. This one comes from the Topps Star Wars: Journey to the Force Awakens set and is an Artist Return I purchased directly from him on eBay. It's a pretty cool Darth Vader sketch in it's own right, but that's not even the best part. You may notice the little cut in the card next to the artist's signature in that scan on the right. That's what allows this to happen:

The card came with a lightsaber attachment that can be extended and retracted for battle. Either that or it's an extra-long tube of lipstick for touching up Vader's makeup while he's out and about. Can't have your face looking ratchet when you're choking Admirals and reviewing the troops. This is one of the cooler sketch cards in my collection and I'm glad I was able to add it to my collection.