JLA Archive Cards, better than Lichtenstein

One trading card set I haven’t seen in my local Forbidden Planet is the Rittenhouse Justice League Archives card set, which is a pity as they’re actually rather good (the cards that is, not FB – that’s a slowly brewing rant for another day). Luckily there are sellers on eBay that sell the entire 72-card base set for less than five-pounds. Fast, quick, and without the hassle of having to buy separate packets. There is a rumour that there might not be any more DC Cards of any sort, so this may be the last set we see. Maybe they need to address the marketing and distribution if my experiences are anything to go by. Well if it is the last set they’re certainly going out with style.

What I like about these cards is that they’ve turned the old Mike Sekowsky JLA artwork into expertly cropped masterpieces. The card quality is also higher than most card-sets so  that enhances the feel that this is a cut above the rest. I’ve posted some examples above. I particularly like that Flash card (card #55 featuring JLA #54 – the Royal Flush Gang’s return). It has a certain pop-art feel to it that easily surpasses anything by old Lichtenstein (as a digression: I recently saw one of Lichtenstein’s comicbook panels for the first time in a Madrid show. Can’t say I was impressed. In almost all cases the original panels are better than his vaunted swipes).

Something I did side step by just buying the base set was the entire phenomena of sketch cards. As they sound, these are little card sized sketches done by one of 39 artists who each do 200+ sketches. It works out as less than one sketch card per base-set. Plenty of people just collect the sketch cards so it should be quite easy to pick up their disregarded base-sets.