The Art of the Sheet

Advertising is becoming more vulgar, in case you hadn't noticed. K mart wasn't even attracting spiders to its stores until it rolled out a video called "Ship My Pants"; now I have it on good authority that spiders flock to K marts, and occasionally even bring their own fly guys. K mart followed up this Citizen Kane of quasi-vulgar, semi-viral disgusting-discount-store videos with another called "Big Gas Savings." So if K mart were writing this blog, the title of this post would just be the tip of the mushy brown iceberg. But since K mart has absolutely nothing to do with this blog aside from providing 85.2 million Topps Collectors' Edition boxed sets as lovely parting gifts, we return you to our regularly scheduled post.


I was checking out a rival blog at the behest of my buddy Sparky. I don’t do this often; I believe it’s a big ocean with more than enough complete ignorance of our existence to go around, and I won’t pick on yours if you won’t pick on mine. Besides, I gave up reading for Lent.

Anyway, this person’s blog basically ridicules the poses and designs found on individual cards. It’s a lot of fun and really well done and good for them, but I occasionally (okay, make that rarely) aspire to more.  I could spend the rest of my natural days, plus a few of the unnatural ones, shooting the fish in the bottom of that barrel. To me the aggregate is much more interesting. Any cardmaker is going to goober out a stool sample when faced with an 4-A shortstop who just was traded from the Astros to the Expos for Don Bosch and a player to be named later, or a product manager whose sister-in-law does this groovy painting thing where she imagines steroid-fueled sluggers as Shetland horses (“My Little Phony,” she calls it). It’s when an entire set or series of sets is redolent of the cattle barn at the Trempealeau County Fair that you have to question the motivation of the … uh, cow-makers.

Speaking of cows and their byproducts, leave us examine the promotional sheet issued by Fleer in 1993 to promote its football set. If you were around the business at all during the Handful O’Landfill era you remember these sheets and scores of others just like them. They were the main way cardmakers built demand for upcoming products. The idea was that the promo sheet would get out in quantities limited enough so that demand built for the promo sheet and its subsequent card set without the sheet being flat-out unobtainable. This was a tightrope much skinnier than the hawser Nik Wallenda strung across the Grand Canyon, and in the end most of the cardmakers wound up plunging into the abyss, with nothing to break their fall.[1]

In 1993 Fleer made two different football products – Ultra and this. In case you couldn’t tell, this was the base product. And while a lot of lips in those days were swearing that the base-level products got as much attention as the high-zoot stuff, a lot of hands were being held behind backs with fingers crossed.

There’s really nothing bad about these cards per se. In 1993, this passed for a pretty nice base set. Back then we were screaming for action shots – shots of football players playing football – that were in focus, and with the most prominent player in the photo being the player featured on the card.[2] We wanted full-color backs with something of interest on the flip side, stats that meant something and copy that wasn’t just conspicuous consumption of black ink. We also were minimalists when it came to graphics but we weren’t fanatics about it, though we were whole-namers and not fans of the last-name-only movement.

(Incidentally, this sheet is a perfect example of why we are not last-name-onlyites. The names of the players on this sheet are Young, Walker, Lohmiller, Greene, Heyward, Jones, Smith, and Byars. Two are Hall of Famers and instantly recognizable – Emmitt Smith and Steve Young. Three are recognizable if you were following football in 1993: Craig “Ironhead” Heyward, Kevin Greene, and Keith Byars. But Jones and Walker? Is that Adam Jones and Antoine Walker? Kenny Jones and Kenny “Sky” Walker? Homer Jones and Herschel Walker? Steve Jones and Scott Walker? Well, no; it’s Ernie Jones and Kenny “Ground” Walker, neither of whom spring immediately to mind when considering the NFL landscape of the early ‘90s. In fact, they are so unresponsive in the springing-immediately-to-mind department that I had to check their pulses, and then see who the heck they were. Ernie Jones caught 38 balls for four TDs in 1992, a performance that put him only 70 short of Sterling Sharpe for the league lead. Kenny “Non-Sky” Walker had 1.5 sacks in 1992, his last season in the league -- though, as his card back takes pains to remind us, he was the second deaf person to play in the NFL.)

So let’s recap the players that Fleer used to build a tidal wave of undeniable, irresistible demand for its namesake product among collectors:

·         Arguably the greatest running back of all time;

·         Arguably the greatest quarterback of all time;

·         A borderline Hall of Fame pass-rushing linebacker/defensive end;

·         A durable journeyman running back;

·         A pass-catching third-down specialist;

·         The fourth-best receiver on a 4-10 team;

·         A kicker; and

·         A defensive end who was pitched as the NFL’s wholly inadequate answer to Jim Abbott but was out of football after two years, 16 starts, and 4.5 sacks.

Well, there was also the centerpiece card reading “Fleer ’93 Football – A Game In Every Pack,” a semi-truthful statement when you consider that almost every NFL game has a couple of superstars, some decent players, some marginal guys, kickers, and someone who will be out of the league shortly.

The promo-card business is a crapshoot, as proven by the previously ridiculed cards of Scott Chiamparino and Kevin Morton. The whole enterprise looks even sillier through a 20-year lens. But even given all that, I would choose the ’93 Fleer football promo sheet over the Fleer Ultra X-Men promo sheet that came out a year later.
 

Don’t get me wrong: I like comics. I like comic art. I like comic art on trading cards. I like Marvel comics. I like the X-Men. I like comic art of the X-Men on trading cards. I like comic art of the X-Men on trading cards with a side of fries to go with that shake. But I do not like this promo sheet, Sam I Am.

Here’s why: Look at this sheet. Where do your eyes go? If your eyes are like mine, they go into the back of your head and stay there until it’s safe for them to come out again. There’s so much to look at that you don’t look at anything, and everything is a different color. Beast’s blue is different from Angel’s blue which is different from Iceman’s blue which is different from the blue in the center of the card that serves as a background for the product logo in – you guessed it – a different shade of blue. Hulk Green is different from the ectoplasmic green that serves as the background for the X-Men Gold Team cards, which are, yes, green. There’s Magneto red and Bishop red and Archangel purple and Jean Grey pink (which really, really ought to be a contradiction) and two Storms that don’t really look much like one another, since one looks like a possessed Lady Gaga in a silver bodysuit and the other looks like a possessed Beyonce in a silver bodysuit.[3]

I could have cut this sheet into nine pieces and ridiculed each one separately, but had I done that there would have been nothing to ridicule. This box of Cracker Jack would have contained eight nice-looking comic art cards and a prize.

Sometimes we get so engrossed in the search for stupidity that we overlook the excellence. Sometimes the stupidity is in the presentation. And given that I’ve just spent 1,200 words talking about Fleer promo sheets, sometimes the fricking stupidity is right here.

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[1] More or less. As my son observed while we watched Wallenda battle the winds and praise the Lord, “He’s got something to break his fall. Rocks.”
[2] Seems obvious I know, but even Jim and Sparky would be amazed at how many times this didn’t happen.

[3] Neither being a stretch, sartorially or cerebrally.

Collect This? Read What?

People who were in the card business never got there through traditional, legitimate means. There was never any sort of internship-leading-to-post-graduate-study-leading-to-entry-level-job path all neatly laid out and codified in the employee handbook. It was hard to do in a business where the location of the restroom changed daily.

Instead, you had Harvard MBAs cheek-by-jowl with old journalists, venture capitalists, card-store owners, starry-eyed printers, diaper-division product managers, teenaged paper millionaires, and a sprinkling of paroled felons, for texture.

And the best part was, no one knew what the hell they were doing.

Soon enough, though, a couple of centers of activity emerged. There was the Philly-New York axis, home of the old money, such as it was – Fleer and Topps – plus newcomers like Classic and Major League Marketing. The area was also home to the infamous Renata Galasso shows, which were a sort of Woodstock for hairspray-fueled invective, and the iconic Cherry Hill show, held in a venue that made you exclaim, “Wow! I didn’t know Best Western did medium-security prisons!”

There was Chicago, home to puffy-card-maker Action Packed and the bought-up and relocated Leaf-Donruss. Leaf-Donruss was owned by the Finnish conglomerate Huhtamaki Oi, which is coincidentally what the Finns said when they saw Donruss’ balance sheet.

There was California, home to Upper Deck, and that was enough. If any more card makers had tried to settle out there Richard McWilliam would have pushed them into the sea.

There was Dallas, home to Pro Set and Pinnacle Brands and their bankruptcy lawyers.

And then there was Raleigh-Durham, home to Impel Marketing and SkyBox International, and later Maxx Racing, Inkworks, and the Racing Champions conglomerate.

The reason the card business stuck in Raleigh is pretty simple. Drive to downtown Durham, go past the gated community known as Duke University, park your car, whisper in its ear that you’ll see it in Heaven, and then sniff the air. It smells like an unsmoked cigarette.

The tobacco industry had spent millions building a distribution network aimed at having a pack of cancer sticks at the ready any time the impulse struck. It was no trick to pour a similarly addictive product through the same pipeline.

The first products through the pipe were NBA Hoops cards, which were tremendously innovative on several fronts. They were the first card set produced with the active involvement of a licensor – the NBA, obviously – which meant they were also the first card set produced with the active involvement of a midget. In that regard the David Stern set paved the way for … nothing, really, until the arrival of Zany Cards several years later. (Watch for the full Zany Cards story in a future installment.)

NBA Hoops were a seasonal item, but the nicotine taps were as wide-open and flowing as BP’s hole in the bottom of the sea. As a result, the NBA Hoops people – who were Impel Marketing at that time – needed more products to plug the pipeline.

Hence, Collect-A-Books.

If you weren’t a collector in 1990 this may not make sense. If you were a collector back then you have no business reading this, because one of the defining characteristics of collectors in the day was that they couldn’t read.

That’s not quite true, because I edited a card-collecting magazine that 100,000 people at a crack claimed to have read, though based on the letters I received, 79,000 just looked at the picture of the fat guy with the cards stuck to him. It was more that when it came to cards they didn’t care whether they read.

Companies like Pro Set spent vast sums compiling detailed player dossiers for their card backs, justifying the continued existence of Erik Affholter, only to find out that collectors liked a big ol’ glob of foil better. And Emmitt Smith on the front, if you please.

Collect-A-Books were the guy with the canoe, paddling against the current of this particular stream. While they didn’t bother to glorify Erik Affholter, they did carry far more reading material in their eight card-sized pages than most collectors deemed safe.

If you count words you'll discover that these cards were not exactly a pocket-sized War and Peace, delving into the crevasses of Ozzie Smith’s id. They carried as many words as your average Pro Set card (which incidentally was all out of go once it had one sentence down on Erik Affholter).

And lest collectors get too uneasy, Collect-A-Books also carried a whopping six pictures, including a snazzy caricature on the back cover.

Collect-A-Books were as well done as a trading-card sized player booklet could be, except no one bothered to ask beforehand whether anyone wanted a trading-card-sized player booklet.

Not to go all marketing on you, but that is a somewhat large question. I mean, there's always the possibility that it might be a bad idea, and that someone doesn't want a 30.06 that doubles as an mp3 player.

In the case of anyone wanting Collect-A-Books, the answer was no. A Hardee's Thickburger of a no. And it wouldn’t have mattered if the message had been delivered with the sensitivity of Sharon Osbourne showing the door to a prepubescent Taylor Swift impersonator on America’s Got Talent. The answer was still no.

You know, Topps, for all its what-the-hell approach to marketing, had this figured out years previous. It made insert sets and test issues of small paper comic books of top baseball and hockey players. They were very cool, even if they did drip a little cheddar. And card buyers said “ehh.” Give us a good rub-off (or rub-on or scratch-off or peel-‘n’-stick or something we can mutilate) any day.

If collectors weren’t going to clutch stone-free mini-comic-books of Reggie Jackson to their bosoms, they certainly weren’t going to nuzzle up to a pricey (approaching two bucks a pop, if memory serves) instruction manual on Ozzie Smith.

While Collect-A-Books were ostensibly created by a company called CMC they were run through the Impel pipeline, where they promptly clogged up the works and delayed the release of the latest paper-wrapped-death flavor for at least 10 minutes.

In the end, Collect-A-Books didn't put an eye out or explode when you ran over them or contribute to global warming, but you don't have to be Pol Pot to be despicable. What made Collect-A-Books nasty was that they were dumped on collectors by companies that frankly didn’t care whether they were unloading this stuff on George Plimpton and His Pals or a flock of seagulls. (The birds, not the band.)

Since this is a somewhat adolescent affair and adolescents always have to blame somebody, we'll blame Collect-A-Books on the diaper-division manager. But only because the teenaged paper millionaire was in a photo shoot with Russell Maryland and Brien Taylor.