Yes, people actually trade ’em.
Fred Flintstones and Jeffrey Dahmers. Comics superheroes and Playboy Playmates. “Saturday Night Live” characters and Iran-Contra characters. Yeshiva rabbis, Hustler Honeys and Elvises. Just about any slice of pop culture these days can be found on trading cards-the good, old-fashioned kind that used to come with a stale, oversized, pasty piece of gum and feature a fully clothed ballplayer on one knee holding a bat.
Miss January isn’t on one knee and her card isn’t accompanied with any gum. But there she is, on her very own trading card.
Twist on childhood hobby
“Trading cards have become one of the hottest hobbies in America,” says Mike Perlis, president and publisher of Playboy magazine, which recently unveiled its Centerfold Collector Cards.
And unlike the boom in sports cards in the ’80s when Baby Boomers were raiding their parents’ basements to find cards from their childhoods that could help put their own kids through college, the hot cards these days feature entertainers, comic-book characters and criminals.
“A lot of the sports people (collectors of sports trading cards) came over to non-sports because people want to be where it’s hot,” says Les Davis, publisher of The Wrapper, a magazine for collectors of non-sports trading cards published in Geneva, Ill.
Indeed, non-sports cards have gone from 5 percent of the $2 billion a year retail trading card market in 1991, including sports, to 15 percent in 1992, according to George White, owner of Top Dog Marketing and spokesman for cardmaker Skybox International. That’s $300 million a year in retail business for non-sports cards.
According to Non-Sport Update magazine, the bible of non-sports trading cards, about 170 sets of cards were produced last year, compared to 10 in 1985.
The comic-book industry is behind much of the boom in non-sports cards, according to White, who attributes the boom less to cultural trends and the slowdown in sports cards than to higher-quality cards and card companies hiring comic-book artists to create original works and to tie in comic-book story lines to the cards.
Culture vultures are also eager to snap up anything with popular images on them. White’s 1991 research of 35,000 card-buyers showed that 60 percent of those buying entertainment cards were doing so for the first time.
Companies such as Eclipse Enterprises in Forestville, Calif., are expanding the playing field with cards featuring serial killers, dictators, AIDS awareness, jazz greats, James Bond and political figures.
`Pocket-size’ Playboy
“You never know what’s going to be next,” Davis says.
The Playboy collection, for example, features Playmates and its magazine covers from 1953 to present-and is advertised as “pocket-size excitement.” Each edition will feature three cards from every issue of a particular month. The first edition, for example, features the centerfold, a pictorial and the cover from each of the magazine’s 40 January issues.
The next edition will feature three cards from each February issue, and so on.
Playboy’s cards (10 cards per pack, at a suggested retail price of $1.99) are marketed to the magazine’s loyal followers and nostalgic Baby Boomers more than to collectors, Perlis says. It’s hard to say how much a Miss January 1971 from the Playboy collection will appreciate.
The production company held a reception at Playboy West in California in March and promotion cards were autographed by some of the Playmates.
“Those cards are already commanding higher prices,” says Gary Colabuono, owner of the Moondog’s comic book and trading card shops in Chicago.
Appeals to many ages
Although many card sets these days carry adult fare, such as First Amendment Publishing Inc.’s “Sex Maniacs” series-which features illustrations and sordid details about the likes of Mike Tyson, Catherine the Great and Jeffrey Dahmer-kid stuff is still popular with collectors young and old.
The Marvel superheroes, for example, are all the rage, according to Colabuono and others. In the meantime, the sports card market is bottoming out after the speculative boom of the ’80s busted.
“People realized they weren’t going to send their kids to college by selling their old baseball cards,” Davis says.
While prices for sports cards skyrocketed in the ’80s (a “Honus” Wagner baseball card fetched $450,000 from a consortium including hockey star Wayne Gretzky), their value was eventually undermined by overproduction, industry observers say.
“It’s a healthy correction,” Colabuono says. “There’s less speculation and more of the hobbyist out there.”
Don’t expect gum
It wasn’t until the turn of the century that interest in baseball spurred the baseball card market, says Eclipse editor-in-chief Catherine Yronwode. Nonetheless, non-sports cards had a loyal following and continued to reflect the interests of the times: movie stars and railroad history in the ’20s; crime figures, G-men and the “Horrors of War” series in the ’30s; sports and political news in the ’50s; entertainment cards such as “Have Gun, Will Travel” and the Beatles in the ’60s.
Then in the ’70s “that kind of stuff (pop culture cards) collapsed,” Yronwode says.
`Blips’ and education
In 1988, Eclipse decided it was time for non-sports cards to make a comeback. “We came out with Iran-Contra, the assassination of JFK, the drug wars, the S&L scandal,” Yronwode says.
What has been left behind is the infamous piece of gum that accompanied most cards since the ’30s, when tobacco was outlawed for minors and a substitute was needed.
Although gum wasn’t the only prize included with cards-Civil War cards sometimes contained fake Confederate money-its strong association may result in cultural dissonance with today’s cards, which are more likely to include condoms, as Eclipse’s “AIDS Awareness” cards do.
Dogs of the border patrol
The non-sports cards will probably never command the values of the highest valued sports cards.
“People aren’t worried about making money like they were with the sports cards,” says Mike Bowman, owner of Barrington Square Cards in Hoffman Estates.
But some will increase in value more than others. Canine cards featuring the dogs of the U.S. Customs border patrol, for example, are wildly popular, Yronwode says.
“For some reason people are whacked out about these dog cards,” she says.
The “Big Little Book” series, a 1937 set produced to promote Dick Tracy and Popeye publications, is estimated to be worth more than $10,000.
More typical, however, is a 1990 Marvel superhero set of 162 cards that originally cost $10 and now could be sold for about $40.
A Jeffrey Dahmer card from Eclipse’s Serial Killer series sells on the open market for up to $15. Original packs cost $1. This series sparked protests against Eclipse and other cardmakers, as well as attempts by some states to outlaw the cards.
The sports card industry welcomes the non-sports cards, according to Dave Sliepka, price guide analyst for Beckett Publications, which publishes monthly magazines for baseball, basketball, football and hockey cards.
Though the sports-card market is soft, Sliepka views the trading card trend as an opportunity.
“We see it as nothing but a positive,” Sliepka says. “It’s bringing new blood into the hobby.”
