Before I started getting comics as a going concern in the late spring/early summer of 1987 I flirted with the idea of collecting baseball cards. I have no idea why. I wasn’t into baseball at all. It wasn’t one of the sports my dad regularly watched. His dad loved baseball and nearly went pro, which is a funny story that I may tell one day. But my dad? He thought it was kind of boring.

I got a few packs of cards and sorted them by teams and even watched a game or two, but it just didn’t stick. At all. Much to the chagrin of the two of the kids I was friends with at the time, who were excited that I seemed to be taking an interest in the game.

Shortly after that I got the collecting bug for comics and that’s the road I went down. It was like a Robert Frost poem if the two roads in a yellow wood were collecting baseball cards and collecting comics, except both of those roads were pretty well traveled in 1987.

To be fair, choosing comics did make all the difference.

Anyway, a few years later, in the summer of 1989, I made a go of collecting an entire set of the Topps Batman movie cards. The packs were cheap and while I liked the images on the cards, because they reminded me of the movie that was the main focus of my life at that time, the thrill of the hunt played more of a part. I loved getting a few packs, opening them, looking through the cards, sorting them, and then seeing how many of the cards were part of the “need” pile and how many would end up in a shoe box because I already had them. Topps put out two series of cards for that film, and I did my best to organically get a set of each.

(For those interested, I did end up with a complete set of the first series. I had to wait until school started, but another kid in my eighth-grade class was also collecting the cards and we made a few trades to get the cards we needed. It would be years until I got a complete set of the second series.)

As luck would have it, the Golden Age of Non-Sports Cards was right around the corner. Several companies started pumping out sets of DC and Marvel cards. Marvel definitely had the bigger market share at first between the character and team specific sets put out by Comic Images and Impel putting out a few series of Marvel Universe cards. DC cards by Impel followed, with two series with the word “cosmic” in the title (Cosmic Cards and Cosmic Teams). After that the floodgates were open and what felt like hundreds of cards sets were produced. They were relatively cheap at first, but as the nineties wore on the packs got more and more expensive, which kind of ruined things for me.

When the packs were $2 it felt like it was worth it. When they started getting to be $4 to $5, I lost interest.

My own Golden Age of cards came in 1991. A new grocery store opened in Trexlertown and one of the things they sold were trading cards.

Not just trading cards.

Boxes of trading cards.

For (what I thought) was a reasonable price, this store sold unopened boxes of Marvel Universe Series II cards and the first series of Jim Lee X-Men cards, and I bought a box of each. It blew my sixteen-year-old mind. It had never even occurred to me that you could buy an entire box of cards and here I was with two. I sat on the floor of my room and quickly came up with a system that I still use to this day. Open a pack and look at the backs, note the number on the card, and then put it in one of the many piles in front of me. The first pile was for cards numbered one through nine, the second pile was for cards numbered ten through nineteen, and so on. It was weirdly relaxing. Going through the cards, putting them in the piles, and then taking those piles and sorting through them until I get a set of that number.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

When I was done, I found that I not only had a complete set of each series, but some of the hologram cards as well.

It was this weird, revelatory experience. I could get an entire set without having to keep going back to Lane’s or that sporting goods store in the middle of the Trexlertown Mall.

Wild.

To be fair, I actually read the cards. Especially the Marvel Universe Series II series. The art was cool, for the most part, and I got to learn more about characters from comics I didn’t read.

As I alluded to earlier, I lost interest in buying comic cards a few years later. Then the early 2000’s rolled around and eBay became a thing and the non-sports card market bottomed out and you could get entire boxes of the comic related cards from the nineties for cheap. Like $10 to $20 a box cheap. I started buying them like crazy and once again I found the opening of the packs and the sorting of the cards to be this weirdly relaxing pastime.

It came in handy in early 2002 when my girlfriend (now my wife) broke her ankle so badly it required surgery and her recovery was long and hard. I was working two jobs at the time and between that and helping to take care of Rachel I was barely sleeping. Going through boxes of cards while she slept or while she was taking medicine or playing video games when she was feeling somewhat better took my mind off of what was going on.

It was during that time period that I began to believe that there was this part of me that still wanted to collect baseball cards and the super hero cards, I was buying fed that need.

Like, I always wanted to collect cards. I just had to find the cards that I wanted to collect.

It’s a theory.

Not a good one, but a theory.

Eventually I bought enough of the different series that I wanted, and I had what I felt was enough, so the eBay searches ended. The cards sat in binders for years. A couple of years ago I sold the Marvel related cards I had because they were going for crazy money. In 2002 a box of Marvel Universe Series II cards cost me $20. In 2022 I sold a set for nearly a hundred dollars.

Again, wild.

But it was a fun time and in 2016 it played into a weird thing that happened at the job I had at the time. I was working as the Copy and Print Production Supervisor at the Staples in Peachtree City and one day I came back from lunch, looked at the monitor behind the counter and saw an image that looked like trading cards with a very modern Drax the Destroyer on them. I clocked the background immediately.

“That background is from the Marvel Universe Series III cards.”

The guy placing the order seemed legitimately shocked. My co-workers had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but I knew what I was looking at and prepared myself for another uncomfortable conversation with a customer about how we couldn’t print copyrighted characters. I was a nightmare in this regard. Most of the people I worked with didn’t know who these characters were and would print stuff they really weren’t supposed to. I was the wet blanket.

I started politely telling the customer that we probably couldn’t print these and the guy (who was really friendly) said this was the second time he’d done this. The cards were things he was making for his guys.

“Your guys?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I’m the head make-up guy for Drax. I make these for the other artists.”

Did I mention that the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie was in production at the time and was being filmed nearby?

Living where I live got really exciting when the studio got built ten minutes from my house.

The guy (and I really regret that I forgot his name) and I spent the next thirty minutes talking about trading cards from the nineties. I did ask him a little about what it was like to do Drax’s make-up, but mainly we waxed nostalgic over the trading card sets from the nineties.

It was a fun time.

I still have most of the DC cards I collected two decades ago. They weren’t going for as much as the Marvel cards and I’ve always been more of a DC guy anyway. I’ll occasionally take them out and look through them in their nine-pocket loaders. They make me happy and remind me of the thrill of the hunt (even online) and how cool it was to open a box and how relaxing it was to open up the packs and sort them.

And the part of me that wanted to collect baseball cards laughs. Because it got what it wanted in the end.

More to follow…