Saturday has become trading card day, so we’re going to roll with that for at least another week.

Bloodlines was the crossover event that DC put out in 1993. Like the crossovers of 1991 and 1992 (with the exception of War of the Gods) DC used their annuals to tell the story which, in all honesty, was probably for the best. This was not one of DC’s better crossovers. It wasn’t Genesis, but that’s like saying breaking my leg wasn’t as bad as breaking my arm. The basic plot was that aliens invade Earth and kill people by drinking their spinal fluid. Some of those people develop super powers.

Hilarity, quite unintentionally, ensues.

Basically DC wanted to develop new characters and this was their excuse to do so. Marvel did the same thing during the same year.

Because it was this was the nineties, Bloodlines got a trading card set made up of the new characters. However, they hedged their bets by tying the whole affair with The Reign of the Supermen. This is one of the last times that DC used Superman, or Superman related characters, to sell something.

First up are the cards for the new characters that first appeared in the various Superman annuals.

Loose Cannon was co-created by Jeph Loeb and was basically Mood Ring Hulk. He ended up appearing in a Justice League Task Force story and even got his own mini-series, which wasn’t half bad. Sparx had a life outside of Bloodlines as well. Not only was she part of the Blood Pack mini-series, but she was also a regular in Superboy and The Ravers. Some of you read that sentence and recognized that it was made up of words and those words were in English, but they barely made any sense. Edge went nowhere. Myriad is interesting because he ties into the last chapter of Funeral for a Friend.

I could go on but the desire to be snarky is strong right now. Enjoy some of the other cards that featured these characters.

As I mentioned earlier, this card series was tied into Reign of the Supermen. As such, the four Supermen got their own cards.

They even got foil cards, of which I only have one. Some of you are now questioning my commitment to Sparkle Motion. I’ll get them at some point.

The gimmick to this series is that packs would randomly have an offer to get the “One, True Superman” card. It wasn’t hard to get, either at the time or back in the late 2000s when I found one on eBay. The card you were supposed to fill out looked like this.

And here’s the One, True Superman card.

More to follow…