Family Guy cards include one-of-a-kind Ghostbusters card
Posted on July 3, 2008
It’s a brilliant idea for selling cards - for every one box of card packs, Inkworks randomly inserted a hand-drawn card, created by one of 13 comics artists. The variety is amazing (click here for five pages of samples - and simple math will tip you off that there are hundreds more out there), but the prize catch is this Peter Griffin as Ghostbuster card by Chris Moreno (which sold for $150 on ebay - yowza!)
Thanks to Justis for the heads up - man, if only we had $150 lying around, eh?
[UPDATE] Good grief - A look at the first series, which also featured these sketch cards, had 6,340 of them, drawn by 14 artists. Some artists did over 500 cards each! And you can see them all here. Let’s hope they put all the series 2 cards up as well, so we can see if they did any more Ghostbuster cards (maybe not, but hey… maybe.)
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Reminds me of the Ghostbusters spoof in the Family Guy episode “The Story On Page One (scroll down a little bit).
I like the Garbage Pail Kids spoof cards at the bottom of page 1 on the Inkworks site you linked to. Speaking of Garbage Pail Kids… Topps did this same thing with the GPK All-New Series 4 a few years ago. You think $150 is expensive? I paid $700/$750 (I don’t remember which amount it was) for a “Master Set” of GPK ANS 4. That includes every card, every chase card, every bonus card, a box, a sales sheet, I think one or two other things, and what made it most expensive: one one-of-a-kind sketch card from every artist who contributed sketch cards to the series. I believe there were five artists in total, but I don’t feel like looking to confirm it right now. Cards from some artists were harder to find than others. You mention that Inkworks put one sketch card in every one box of card packs. I believe with Topps, it was one sketch card per every CASE containing boxes of card packs.
Oh yeah, Garbage Pail Kids are up to All-New Series 7 now, but I stopped after ANS4. Not only was it the most expensive set I ever purchased, but it just became tiresome to collect. Topps kept putting out an unnecessary amount of chase and bonus cards for each set, and I’m sure they still do. The bonus cards, I should let you know, aren’t in the regular packs. They’re exclusive to the 10-pack boxes available at Wal-Mart and Target (and one other store), with each store getting a unique bonus card in their boxes. You know how much of a pain in the ass they are to track down.
Sure I know someone who can get me full sets for a great price (he got me the ANS4 Master Set), sometimes even WITH the bonus cards - and of course there’s eBay, if I want to pay an even higher price - but it just became a chore to deal with buying the newest set, with two sets usually released per year! Considering that my card collection just sits in little plastic cases inside a box on the shelf, it just seems like a lot of wasted time, effort, and money to bother collecting Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages anymore.
I remember back in the day - like 20 years ago - you could buy a box of 48 twenty-five cent packs of cards for $12, and you were almost guaranteed to get two full sets in that box. Nowadays packs are several dollars each, which makes that type of hunting and collecting no longer fun - or cheap! When you have to resort to buying the sets already made, because it’s cheaper than way, a lot of fun is taken out of the hobby.
Chris Moreno is a really great artist. I got this sketch from him at Wizard World Chicago a few years ago:
http://img74.imageshack.us/img74/8629/stp80030mediumcc9gw0.jpg
“That’ll be $27.50!”