Leia Sketches by John Soukup and Bianca Thompson

I really enjoy adding new art to my collection, especially art featuring my favorite characters from comic books and the Star Wars universe. I recently picked up a couple of pieces featuring Princess Leia from two of my favorite artists, John Soukup (Kettle) and Bianca Thompson.

This piece by Soukup is done on a Priority Mail postage label. Apparently there is a whole movement devoted to making art on postal labels and other stickers and then sticking onto things in public places. Label 228 is a popular item for this as it can be obtained in large quantities for free and the surface can accept all sorts of inks and paints. Apparently there is also an arms race going on to develop stickers that cannot be easily removed from surfaces, allowing artists to more permanently affix their work to public fixtures. My inner delinquent thought it might be fun to stick this Leia sketch somewhere in public, but the collector in me reasoned that if I did that I wouldn't have it in my collection anymore.

I wonder if it is hard for artists to sell their art and ship it off to some other person? I think that if I were an artist I would want people to enjoy my work, but I would want to be able to take it back with me and have control of it. Not a great business model. Even with my less personal possessions I find that if I lend it to someone else to get a better look I really have to fight the urge to snatch it back from them when I feel they've had it for too long or aren't appreciative enough of it. I guess I have a bit of a problem with sharing. Probably every artist has an individual level of comfort when it comes to letting their art go out into the world.

And here is a sketch card done by Bianca Thompson featuring Leia as Jabba the Hutt's slave. Thompson recently posted a link to my post about one of her Wonder Woman sketch cards on her Facebook page. It was kind of cool that she went out of her way to plug my blog. I have conflicting feelings about the slave costume which I discussed at length in a previous post about a sketch card. To rehash, it's an important part of the story and it fits into the timeline, but I think people tend to see it as the SEXY slave costume rather than as the sexy SLAVE costume. Maybe it's just nit-picking and I understand that culturally the costume probably reaches further than the films do, so many people know it more from the cultural references to it than from watching and thinking about the films. Like anything, there are multiple viewpoints and we each view everything through a different filter. This is a cool sketch card done in Thompson's distinctive style, and I am happy to have it in my collection. In going through my blog posts it looks like this post contains my 14th and 15th different sketches of Leia, so I'm building a decent little collection. I need to find a way to display them all together.

2013 Press Pass Total Memorabilia Gold Danica Patrick

When there is racing going on I like to post new racing cards if I have them. I probably won't be watching today's Kobalt 400 in Las Vegas because it's a working weekend for me, but I'll at least check in on the standings a couple of times during the day.

Here is a card I picked up from eBay. Sometimes it seems like there aren't any reasonably-priced Danica Patrick cards out there, and at other times it seems like I run into a nice run of cards in my price range. I've picked up a couple of decent Patrick cards lately, including this Gold parallel from 2013 Press Pass Total Memorabilia. This one is numbered # 098 / 275. There's a lot of green on this card, but that won't be the case on future Danica cards, as GoDaddy dropped out as one of her sponsors and got replaced by Nature's Bakery and a light blue color scheme.

So far this year she hasn't had a great run. She wrecked out of the Daytona 500 and finished in 35th place after earning a pretty good starting position of 16th. In the Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 she qualified in 25th and managed to gain five spots over the course of the race for a finish in 20th place. This week she will be starting out in 18th place, so we'll see what she can do with that. 

Panini wound up getting the NASCAR license, which from my perspective isn't the greatest outcome, but it will be nice to see some new NASCAR cardboard on the market. Hopefully they can at least approach the standard that Press Pass set. Prizm is reported to be the first set out of the gate, but I don't think a release date has been set.

This card wasn't a spectacular addition to my collection, but at this point I am pretty happy just to have something new to add. Here's hoping my favorite drivers do well in the race today.

Seeking Redemption 16: The Replacement Pt. 2 (Topps Makes Good)

In February I posted about a disappointing replacement that Topps had sent me for an outstanding redemption I had from 2013 Topps Archives Baseball that probably wasn't going to be produced. After thinking it over and discussing it in the comments of that blog post I submitted a follow-on ticket to Topps Customer Support, outlining my reasoning and asking what they could do for me. I think I was able to make my case civilly, and I hope it read that way on the other end.

After about a week I got a message back saying that Topps had miscalculated the value on the original transaction and that they would be sending me a replacement card with a book value of $40. A couple of weeks after that a package showed up in the mail with the following card enclosed:

It's a 2013 Topps Museum Collection Momentous Materials Jumbo Relic Autograph card of Josh Hamilton. Cardboard Connection says that these fell one per case in Museum Collection, and this copy is numbered # 09 / 10. These are not a frequent item that pops up for sale, but the most recent eBay sales for similar items have been in the $25-30 range, which in my opinion lines up favorably with a book valuation of $40. Hamilton isn't a guy I really collect, but I can't complain about getting a case hit from Museum Collection in exchange for my case hit redemption from Topps Archives.

Combining this with the original card they sent me makes up for the original value of my redemption card and the frustration I experienced with the transaction, so I am considering things even at this point. I am satisfied and I think that Topps customer service came through and did right by me in the end. I'll post a link from my original post to this one so that future readers of that post can easily find out what happened.

Finally! The 2015 Topps Stadium Club Set

I've been trying not to bust packs too much lately, as it seems to be more cost-effective to buy collated sets and cherry-pick the hits I want from online sellers. I miss out on the thrill of pack-busting, but I guess that's what repacks, group breaks, and the occasional hobby box are for.

With that attitude I didn't purchase much 2015 Topps Stadium Club at all. I saw plenty of it on the blogs and picked up a few singles here and there, but I was waiting on the base cards until I could pick up the whole set in one go. It took a while, but I finally had a set fall to me at my (cheap-ass) price ceiling. I got it for about 19 cents per card, which I thought was a pretty decent deal. I flipped through the whole thing and picked out a few favorite cards to scan here. I tried to ignore some of the cards that have already had plenty of run in the blogosphere, so you won't find Bip Roberts, Ernie Banks, or George Brett here. I'm no Yankees fan, but this Mariano Rivera card shows how I reacted once I actually landed this set for my collection.

If you're going to use zoomed-in shots of players on your cards, that Josh Donaldson photo is a good example of how to do it. At this point it is hard for any Jose Bautista card to live up to the 2016 Topps Series 1 bat flip card. It would be awesome to be a fan who shows up on a baseball card, but it would be significantly less awesome to be a fan on a baseball card making a derp face.

That J.J. Hardy card is pretty chaotic. I guess the Orioles won't be mixing baseball with Twister again anytime soon. Not pictured on that Dale Murphy card is his mom telling him to clean up all that baseball stuff before someone trips on it and gets hurt.

It's nice to see an athlete showing proper form for the Anthem. So many times on TV broadcasts I see athletes dancing around or focusing on something else during the National Anthem. Football players seem to be the worst offenders in that regard. I guess not all the players are from America but for me it's not a negotiable thing. Bo Jackson was so cool back in the day. I don't even like thinking about the Astros right now. They've got a lot of expectations piled up now, and I have to wonder if their bats can be hot enough and their pitchers can throw well enough to stay in the mix this year. Evan Gattis will play a big role in the team's fortunes once he gets back from hernia surgery.

I don't have much to say about this batch of photos. Just nice photos all around. Stadium Club is a cool set. Maybe if every product looked like Stadium Club it would be too much, but I don't know. What cards out there look better than Stadium Club?

For a while there Yoenis Cespedes must have had his bags all packed, because he moved a few times before finally signing a deal with the Mets. Doug Fister was brought in to (probably) fill one of the back-end rotation spots on the Astros' roster. Hopefully he'll be able to put a poor 2015 behind him.

I picked these cards more for the photos than I did for the guys pictured on the cards. Felix Hernandez showed up to Spring Training this year having bleached his hair and goatee. The look has been universally panned by press and teammates, but Hernandez says he plans to keep the look all year in spite of the criticism.

In the lead paragraph I said I would try to avoid photos that had already seen a lot of run on the blogs, but I couldn't leave out that Eckersley card. It's probably my favorite card in the set. I watch a lot of A's broadcasts on MLB.tv, so I see the big-head A's quite a bit over the course of a season. I'm not sure why it works out that way, but if the Astros aren't on the A's are usually my go-to team. Next on the list would probably be the Blue Jays and then whichever matchup on the day features the most players on my fantasy baseball team.

In hindsight I think the Derek Jeter or Fred McGriff cards would have been better to close the post than that Scherzer card, but I wasn't really thinking about that when I did all the scanning for this post. Oh well.

I'm glad I was able to finally add the set to my collection. My patience paid off in the end, as the price was about 65% of what I anticipated a full set would cost me. There were a couple of cards missing from the set when it arrived, but I was able to purchase the missing cards on Sportlots quickly and without much expense.

At the Trade Deadline 43: I Got Zippy-Zapped

A few days ago I got an unexpected bubble mailer in my mailbox. That's not entirely unheard of, but I am always suspicious that maybe I ordered something and forgot about it. I opened it up and found a familiar phrase on a card taped to one in a stack of several (re)packs of cards. I'd been Zippy Zapped!

Zippy Zapping is the calling card of the aptly-named Zippy Zappy from the blog Cervin' Torren' Up Cards. He's been pretty active on the Zippy Zapping front lately, as there have been quite a few reported Zippy Zappings around the blogs over the last week or so.

There are a few things you can almost always find in a typical Zippy Zapping. One of the main things is prospects. He is a fan of the Long Staten Island Yankees, but he carries a vast knowledge of the farm systems of most teams in baseball. I spend a lot of my time after receiving a package from him doing research, as I don't know nearly enough about even my favorite teams' prospects, let alone the prospects in any other system. I didn't scan all of the cards he sent, but I looked at a few lists of the Astros' top prospects and made sure to scan some guys from the Top 10. A.J. Reed is the up and comer who is rumored to be waiting in the wings if Jon Singleton can't get his bat together pretty quickly. Singleton is one of the guys I collect, so I am hoping he can hit well enough to keep Reed in the minors for a while still. 

Carlos Correa was last year's darling, playing his way to the AL Rookie of the Year award. Zippy Zappy included some nice cardboard of the young shortstop, including some prospect cards, a nice Diamond Kings card I hadn't seen yet, and his Heritage card from the 2015 High Numbers set. I haven't started a Correa PC yet, but I probably should. I guess I prefer to collect prospects like Singleton who haven't lived up to the hype. Their prices are lower.

These 2014 Bowman Draft Picks and Prospects Black parallels were all in sleeves with tags priced in Japanese Yen. I am pretty sure these parallels are from the Asia-exclusive version of the product, which includes several color variations not available in your standard Bowman product.

These brightly-colored parallels are all serially-numbered, with that Vincent Velasquez Prizm Draft card being an eBay 1 / 1, numbered # 001 / 100. It's the first one in the print run, yo! The other guys feature more pedestrian serial numbers. Velasquez is the only name I really recognize in this group, although Joshua Magee seems like I remember him in some back part of my brain.

Probably to keep my head from exploding at the sight of so many prospects, Zippy Zappy also included a number of cards featuring old guys from the Astros franchise, like Bagwell, Berkman, Qualls, and Tejada. There were others, but I have become a lazy scanner in my old age. My main memory from this group is drafting Tejada in fantasy baseball for a couple years after he was useful. I do a lot of dumb things in fantasy baseball, but luckily other players also are irrationally attached to players who have outlasted their usefulness or are prone to chasing prospects too early. Everyone has a weakness.

And here are some guys who contributed to the Astros' big run last year. I especially like seeing the progression of Keuchel's beard. I think Evan Gattis is still my favorite Astro, even though I don't really collect his cards like I should. It's hard to divert myself from my Singleton collection even to chase my favorite player on the team. I've gone too far down the rabbit hole.

Another Zippy Zappy signature is SEGA Card-Gen cards from Japan. The video game associated with these cards was discontinued, though, so these have all but disappeared from the usual acquisition channels. Zippy Zappy himself has announced that his supply is drying up. These are some of my favorite cards, so I am extremely grateful that he sent me three of them from his diminishing inventory. The 2010 and 2011 sets are not well-represented in my collection, so I was very happy to get two cards from 2011 in Wilton Lopez and Carlos Lee and a card of star pitcher Roy Oswalt from the 2010 set.

I didn't scan everything that Zippy Zappy sent, but I did scan a little of everything he sent. I am super grateful for the packages I receive from other bloggers and I do my best to pay it forward in the packages I send out. Zippy Zappy is one of the bloggers I am indebted to, as he has dropped some really nice cardboard bombs on me. Thank you!

Pack of the Day 128: 2 Packs of 2016 Topps Series 1 Toys"R"Us Edition

My twin sons turned five just over a week ago, so we took them out to dinner and then to Toys"R"Us to purchase some stuff with their birthday money. They chose a couple of LEGO kits and some Hot Wheels stuff. While they were doing that, I was looking for the trading cards so I could grab a couple packs of 2016 Topps Series 1 with the exclusive Purple parallels.

I grabbed two packs. There wasn't anything of interest in the regular packs, so I just scanned the Purple Toys"R"Us cards for this post. They are pretty cool, I guess. I got a couple of decent names in my packs, with Jose Abreu and Max Scherzer probably being the best of the bunch. Matt Kemp takes a fairly distant third place, with Erick Aybar following just over the horizon and Martin Maldonado and Travis Jankowski getting participation trophies.

There's not much more to say about these. They're a fun novelty but I can't see myself chasing any more of them. I'm just kind of waiting on 2016 Topps until the factory sets come out. I'm a little bit excited for Heritage, which released today I believe, but I usually just pick up that set once prices come down on it. I'd like to bust some packs of something this year, but my other collecting priorities always seem to push that down the list. I'm not sure Heritage is the thing that's going to jump up to the top.

I was on the news today as a bystander. Well, my car was. I was in the car, but you can't see me. I was on my way home from work and I saw that traffic up ahead was slowing down. Then I saw a police officer standing on the other side of the highway trying to throw a spike strip across the lanes. Pretty soon after that a pickup truck came down the highway with three or four police cars in pursuit. The truck drove around the spike strip and then the police cars went around the spike strip. A little ways back the police nudged the truck and it wrecked. When I went home and saw the news the video from the traffic camera picked up right as I was driving past. That was pretty cool.

At the Trade Deadline 42: An Awesome Trade Package from Lonestarr

I recently got a massive trade package from blogger Lonestarr / Twitch. It touched on nearly every part of my collection. I scanned quite a bit of it for this post, but there was plenty more. I just couldn't scan any longer.

I don't have many Elway cards, and this SPx Gold card is a great addition to my collection. I remember that the Hakeem Olajuwon SPx Gold from this set's basketball equivalent was one of the prizes of my collection in my teen years. Hologram, die-cut, and foil on thick card stock? Yes, please!

This package may have nearly doubled my Peyton Manning collection. It certainly was a big boost to the number of Manning cards I have showing him in a Broncos uniform. I've heard rumors that Peyton will officially announce his retirement soon. I guess we'll see what happens. That whole business with the sexual harassment allegations from his college days is pretty disappointing. Without any context outside of working in male-exclusive jobs for a large portion of my life I imagine he tried to pull some sort of prank that went over the line, and instead of owning his actions he denied them and went on the attack. Probably a sincere apology and an admission of wrongdoing 20 years ago would have cleared the whole business up.

There were plenty of other Broncos in the package. That Terrell Davis is probably my favorite of this bunch, although it is hard to deny the power of Tim Tebow. I wore my Tebow jersey just the other day. Apparently there was a poll recently in which respondents were asked who their favorite and least favorite NFL quarterbacks were. Tim Tebow appeared in the top handful of both lists (5th-most popular, 2nd-least popular), despite the fact that he hasn't played in a regular season NFL game for a few years.

Switching sports to basketball, several Houston Rockets cards were included in the package, highlighted by a couple of appearances by my favorite player of all time, Hakeem Olajuwon. I also liked that Panini Black Friday Dwight Howard card, although Dwight Howard himself has been pretty underwhelming as a Rocket. I have to wonder how long it will be before he and James Harden get run out of town and the Rockets enter another rebuilding phase without really living up to their potential? It's almost like a repeat of the Yao Ming / Tracy McGrady days, although their problems had more to do with injuries than with attitude. I don't know why that Earl Boykins cards has rounded corners. It must be a parallel that I am not aware of.

There were two other cards in this Astros scan, but I cropped them out when I discovered a big hair on the scan in front of one of them. It was a sweet card, but I was so done with the scanner by that time. I like that Bill Virdon card. I pulled an autograph of his out of a box of Heritage in 2014. For whatever reason that makes him stick in my head. I'm not about to run out and start a Bill Virdon PC, but I'm at least two cards into one now. I love those rainbow-colored uniforms. Sometimes I think I might be part unicorn or part leprechaun or something.

There were plenty of Astros from all eras in this package. I think I've mentioned at least six times that I didn't scan them all. I DIDN'T SCAN ALL THE CARDS IN THIS PACKAGE! There were a lot of cards. If I were a rapper I would be bragging about all of my phat stacks (of cards). But I'm not a rapper. When I try to sing or rap my wife tells me, "No!" and mists me with a spray bottle.

That Nolan Ryan / J.R. Richard card is one of the cooler cards in the package. It's an Astros card, but it's also a Nolan Ryan card, but from a time when he wasn't an Astro. And now the Astros are in the A.L. so this card wouldn't even be possible anymore unless they started making AL West Leaders cards. At that point Topps would have jumped the shark. Can you imagine Division Leader cards for all of the different divisions? That would be ridiculous.

The Astros probably got the least freaky of the 1995 Fleer card designs. Things don't get all that trippy until you're below the waistline and the colors go weird, which I guess is kind of a metaphor for life.

I like those framed Gypsy Queen parallels. That's one of the few things I like about the Gypsy Queen brand. I guess I'm a Ginter man if it comes down to faux-old-timey vintage brands. I like that Lance Berkman Soaring Stars card. It's like he's defending the Earth from Randy Johnson-thrown meteors with a cosmic bat or something.

Now we're getting to the hits portion of this trade package. Those two cards on the top are serially-numbered. Nolan Ryan is # / 250 and Tony Scheffler is # / 200. Olajuwon is die-cut, Prizmed, and # / 199. Also he is wearing those cool goggles that he sported for a while. He tried, but he couldn't rock the goggles as well as Horace Grant did. If there were a Mt. Rushmore of eyewear it would definitely have Horace Grant and Kent Tekulve on it. Who else would be on it? That Aaron West autograph is pretty cool, too. When I see the name Aaron it makes me think of that Key & Peele Substitute Teacher skit.

These relics are all pretty cool. I believe that Lancaster JetHawks Mascot Patch is my first manu-patch relic. Some of my readers might be impressed that I have remained untainted this long, while others wonder why I didn't get on the manu-patch train a long time ago. My one stalker might comb feverishly through my posts to find out if this really is my first manu-patch card. I know for sure that the J.R. Towles card in the upper right contains my first game-used base relic. The other relics are your more standard swatches of fabric, but the Rod Smith is # / 750 and the other card contains the previously-mentioned Tracy McGrady's pants or something. It's not a breathable enough material to be a jersey.

Closing things out are some non-sports items in the form of sketch cards featuring some of my favorite comic book characters. I believe the She-Hulk sketch was done by Lonestarr / Twitch himself, while the Wonder Woman sketch was done by Colby Zigler. I haven't been able to add as many She-Hulk and Wonder Woman sketches to my collection as I'd like, so these were a welcome addition to my sketch card binder. (I wish I had a sketch card binder. I actually don't. I have a vague idea of which sketches I have and sometimes I can find them in among the other cards in boxes and the piles of cards on my desk.

Closing things out is a sketch of Power Girl reminding all the fanboys out there that Cosplay does not equal Consent. That's a big deal with cosplayers and models, both online and at convention or promotional appearances. Sketch artist Cesar Feliciano has illustrated what might happen if one of these rude folks mistook Power Girl for a cosplay model.

This was an awesome package from top to bottom, and I was super-stoked to flip through all of it. I wasn't super-stoked to scan all of it, but I scanned many of the best parts. The rest of the stuff you'll just have to wonder about. It was all pretty cool, with plenty of touches personally-tailored to my collecting habits. Thank you!