Hi,

I was wondering if anybody collected these? I thought they were fun, humorous, the cards had artwork of covers satiring famous comics.

It was pretty cool. Also, there were some nice parallel cards, autographed cards and sketch cards.

David

I did. I had a factory set at one point-not sure where it is at the moment.

I looked at "completed" auctions on ebay. People are still buying common sets and the prices seem high? I mean a set like this going for $7-10? I guess it seems high to me, I see a lot of these sets on ebay.

I find it interesting and chase sets are not going for much more even though they are "rarer", like complete sets of silver cards.

David

I bought a case of 40 boxed sets for $12 + $13 shipping in 2003. The seller still has 9 cases left.

I've been collecting these for a while now. I still need one of the box topper 4-card panel foils, and most of the autographed cards. The autograph cards and sketch cards are very tough to find. I beleive some of the box topper 4-card panels are also short printed also.

Dan

quote:

Originally posted by tiggerhouse:
I've been collecting these for a while now. I still need one of the box topper 4-card panel foils, and most of the autographed cards. The autograph cards and sketch cards are very tough to find. I beleive some of the box topper 4-card panels are also short printed also.

Dan

I agree with your speculation about short-prints, but the numbers for this series have "impressed" me. Perhaps they didn't print and distribute as many of the boxes/packs as they intended, or we'd be seeing even more of them.

Math: There were supposed to be 2400 each of the box-topper panels = 60,000 boxes. That would mean 500 sketches, not unreasonable but high for the time period, and 5400 autographs.

Still that's a lot of retail boxes with packs, and Active Marketing didn't make many card series (Hustler mainly, plus James Dean and this one) and probably didn't have the most mature distribution network. Sure, this was at the peak of the retail card market, but I wonder if half of the cards ever made it into collector hands. With the boxed sets, we're talking about 340,000 base sets possible ...

I think you mean 5,000 autographed cards? 100 of each card in the 50 card set were autographed.

I don't know what to say about the 60,000 boxes, etc. All I know is back then the production numbers were huge. I mean 64,000 numbered boxes for Jeffrey Jones.

David

quote:

Originally posted by dpolis:
I think you mean 5,000 autographed cards? 100 of each card in the 50 card set were autographed.

5400 comes just from the ratio to the box-topper numbers. Agreed that 100*50 autos were announced, though 10% extra of inserts made (versus the number advertised) isn't unusual. Using 5000 autos at 1:400 packs says 55,556 boxes and you get an "overage" for the box-toppers.

Think of the Writer's Cramp after the signing party!

Thirteen years later...I wasn't looking for one but it came up in a search for something else. It's an elusive Defective Comics sketch. The seller wants $3500. It's certainly interesting to see one as I'd never seen one before. There are only a couple of mentions of them on Card Talk.

I'm not sure you can get $3500 for something like that. There are a few sketch collectors here who would be interested because they remember the card set or even collected it back then but never saw a sketch. Assuming you had that much extra to spend, would you do it?

Meanwhile, out among the hipsters with money to burn on "investments," the Defective Comics card set is likely beyond familiarity except to maybe a few who have had an interest in the history of sketch cards.

I saw that auction. $3500 is crazy.

A few hundred dollars at the most if anything.

These sketch cards are cool though. I have a few myself.

David

Yeah, I was thinking it might get $400 as a BIN on the outside but if it went to auction, it would sell for $275-325, though you never know how high two collectors who really want one might go.

Yeah, it was certainly interesting to see that. Do yours show other subjects?

I can do better than that.

This article from the artist from this set is about some of the sketch cards he did. Interesting read.

https://markvoger.com/2020/06/the-500/

Enjoy!

David

quote:

Originally posted by tiggerhouse:
I've been collecting these for a while now. I still need one of the box topper 4-card panel foils, and most of the autographed cards. The autograph cards and sketch cards are very tough to find. I beleive some of the box topper 4-card panels are also short printed also.

Dan

I too am down to just needing two of the box toppers, #5 and #12. I'm interested to know if one of those is also the one you lack.