Pure Card Porn

Billy Williams RC!

I’m miserable and cranky and pissed off about so many things I don’t even know where to begin, so I’m just going to show off a 12-pack of card porn to lighten the mood, because the mood definitely needs lightened.  So let us take refuge in the cards… These are all mine, picked up by various means over the past few months.  Yes, including that beautiful beat up Billy Williams RC at the top of the post (cost: $3 on COMC on Black Friday 2013).

Frank Thomas Jersey & Card Frame..

This was also part of the trade with Shot Not Taken.  It didn’t make it into that post for the simple fact that it was still in my backpack and didn’t get scanned until around two weeks later.

2009 Draft Picks & Prospects Neftali Feliz Purplefractor RC..

This came out of a random discounted fat pack I stumbled across towards the end of last year.

Roxxi Printing Plate Autograph..

Possibly the earliest pickup here.  Cool printing plate with a sticker auto stuck on it of perhaps the single most underutilized woman in the history of TNA’s Knockout division.  And that’s saying something, when they also severely underutilized Ayako Hamada, who might be the single most talented lady wrestler in the world, and of course my girl Sarita, who has gone onto to bigger success in both Mexico and Japan.

2013 Bowman EJ Manuel Orange parallel #’ed 54/299..

The back compares him to competent game manager Alex Smith.  I don’t know how to feel about that…

2008 Donruss Elite Extra Edition Cat Osterman Collegiate Patches Autograph #’ed 160/250..

It is the realest shame Panini ran this concept into the ground so fast, because this card, much like Cat herself, is absolutely spectacular.

Bloodlines Liz Carmouche auto..

Here’s a fearsome and fantastic addition to my fledgling Girlrilla page, which is now up to TWO.

Milk Duds Billy Williams..

More Billy Williams!  This time it’s super beat up vintage food-based oddball goodness.

2003 Topps Traded Shin- Soo Choo Gold #’ed /2003..

I’ve been jonesing for a new addition to my Shin-Soo Choo page for awhile now, and this is what I came away with.

BowChro Aramis RC..

The desire to break 100 cards with another player does not preclude me from getting more cards of future Hall of Famer Aramis Ramirez.  This was one of a half dozen newbies of him in my latest COMC shipment.  They may crop up here & there over time.

Heroes & Prospects Andre Dawson Jersey..

Whine about lack of logos all you want, you big babies.  This card just oozes class. 😉

’09 iMPACT! Booker T auto #’ed /60..

Closing out this post with my favorite wrestler of all-time!  Booker T autos are extremely hard to come by cheaply (dog tag auto aside), but I managed to secure this bad mamma-jamma on COMC for $8.  It’s even an inscribed version.  Unlike every other WWE reject, Booker never won the TNA World Title, but they did create a brand new vanity belt (later renamed and became their midcard title) specifically for him.  So I guess he’s got that going for him, which is nice.

That’s all for now.  Time to go work on some half-baked novel writing or some such.  Thanks for stopping by, and we’ll be seeing y’all again real soon.

Until our next…

Shot Taken

The Orange Goblin..

Finally pulled the trigger on another trade with my most frequent trading partner, Shot Not Taken!  Lot to get to, so with relatively minimal textual commentary clutter and just pure card porn, here is what came my way.  Roll that beautiful bean footage:

Assorted Bowman and a couple Ernies..

This Kree-Skrull War puzzle was an unexpected surprise. 🙂

One Little Corner..

Space is the place…

Martial Mastery..

And of course, minis!

Triple Threat..

Best of WWE..

It is kinda hard to tell, but that Booker T base card is actually a bronze parallel.  The normal foil logo on the base cards is red.

According to my wantlist, I actually still needed this base card!

Hall of Famer & Superb Owl-winning QB, Roger Staubach!

Angelina Love-o-graph..

Roger & Angelina were consolation for a card I inquired about that wasn’t available.  I’ve been wanting an Angelina Love auto for awhile now though, & Staubach will be made available for trade.  He should net me a nice return and turn this into a technical three-way deal, if one comes along.

Very seriously considering adding Kane to Single Page Sensations..

Trouty Mays Lava Flow!

This card is so much more gorgeous in person.  So much so that I decided to acquire a full page of Panini’s Black Friday Lava Flow parallels.  This goes on the Trout page, but I’ve already acquired Bryce Harper and Kevin Durant for the Lava Flow page.  So just a heads up that I’m looking to trade for some more if anyone in the blogosphere has any.

What appears to be black on this is actually bronze-ish foil. Scanners are fickle mistresses..

I also picked up a Nomah RC shortly after this arrived.  Now if I could just trade for or find a good looking sub-$15 to buy (well, when I’m not completely broke again) for a possibly all-time record speed trifecta acquiring.

Finally got a Rizzo hit! 😀

Awesome way to close this post.  And that be that.  Even my attempt at sparse commentary turns out to be not all that sparse.  Thanks again for being a prime time trading partner, Ray!

Until our next…

The Centerpiece!

Something really really amazingly beyond cool came in the mail yesterday.  I don’t even know where to begin… But I guess the beginning will do.  As you know, I have a Sarita, aka “Dark Angel” Sarah Stock, supercollection going.  It’s pretty great.  I’m not sure why, but she (and to a lesser extent Hamada) was who I was drawn to when TNA brought in a bunch of women wrestlers to fill out the Knockouts division.  And even though she was way underutilized, she hung around quite awhile and did some good work in TNA and was part of the Knockouts great early run.

She has a fair amount of cards from her stint in TNA, nearly all of which I have acquired at least one version of, and they tend to be pretty inexpensive.  I’ve even amassed a trio of 1/1s, though they do tend to push the upper limits of my card budget.

Anyway, I’ve still been following along with her and her career since she joined up on Twitter at some point after leaving TNA.  She’s been splitting her time between Japan & Mexico and has enjoyed a good amount of success.  She’s always seemed pretty cool and easy to root for in the limited interaction I’ve had with her on there.  Which leads us to about a week & a half ago.

I powered up my internets to find a new 1/1 Sarita card had surfaced on the ol’ eBay.  Much to my dismay, however, it had a BIN of $500 on it!  Boo-urns.  So like I am want to do, I took to twitter to passively-aggressively whine about it.  I am a whiny ass sometimes and Twitter is a good place for anonymous whining, what can I say…

But then a funny thing happened.  The Dark Angel herself replied back, saying she would send me “something even cooler for free”.  After confirming she was for realz about it, I sent her my address.  And yesterday, from south of the border… it arrived.

What arrived, you may ask?  Behold!

Wrist/arm thing from sleeveless side..

Could it be?!

Oh my..

Yes!

The top was too big for to fit in one shot..

A full set of wrestling gear!

One side had a sleeve is why it wouldn’t fit..

I literally had tears in my eyes as I pulled each piece out.

The rest of the sleeve..

How freakin’ unbelievably cool is this?!

The other side of the unattached wrist/arm piece..

Oh yeah, each item is also signed!

The separate wrist/arm piece signature..

The bottoms..

The signature on the top is on the inside..

Like all things in life really (especially my own), my digital camera is… hit-or-miss.  So if you can’t quite read it, this is what they say:

Sarita

Dark Angel (with wings on the outside)

-2014- ♥

Briefs back..

This is all just so unreal… I still don’t know if it’s fully sunk in.

Other side of the top..

They smelled lovely, btw.  I mean, wait… Ha!  I didn’t get all creepy about it!  They just had a powerful perfume-y scent you didn’t have to be right up by to catch.  Was very intoxicating and will stick with me for awhile.  Yaharr… Moving on.

Other side of sleeve..

Rest of other side of sleeve..

Oh and check this out!  I immediately recognized this gear from somewhere, but a Google search didn’t find what I was looking for.  But then I checked my own collection.

Immortalized in card form..

Yep, I’m pretty sure that she sent me the same gear she’s wearing in this card.  This was already way beyond the call, but that somehow makes all of this even more insanely cool.  And all because I was a whiny tool on twitter.  That’s… um, that’s probably not the lesson you should take away from all of this. 😛

Anyway, I am so beyond grateful and humbled by this gift.  I mentioned when I sent her my address that I couldn’t in good conscience accept it for free, even though my promise of sending some original art in return seems so paltry in comparison now.  But I guess that means I just gotta step my art game way up to make it worthwhile.

Thank you again, Dark Angel!  You are fantastic and amazing and I am down 4-Life!

Until our next…

The Lonestarr Personal Collection: Wrestling Hits

Well, the posts are just slowly trickling in, but trickling in they still are.  Here are a few of my favorite pro graps cards from my collection for your approval.

2008 TNA iMPACT! Booker T Yellow Printing Plate..

Booker is my favorite wrestler of all-time, and this is my best card of him.  Despite having a lot of autographs (as wrestlers go anyway) out there, I’ve yet to come across one within my price range.  The 6 (should be more like 10-12) time World Champion and one of the single most decorated champions overall in the history of professional wrestling blew my mind as a kid with his heavy, but not really martial arts, kick-based offense that’s never really been duplicated, and agility.  He could fly a little too, with the Harlem/Houston Hangover, which is one of the coolest moves ever invented.  He’s also being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, which is pretty cool too.

2012 Topps WWE Eve Torres WrestleMania XXVIII Mat Relic

It’s sad Eve left right when she turned in an absolutely amazing heel run (oddly similar in to the Batista’s run, in every aspect).  I was down with Eve from her first televised match, which I just happened to catch even though I almost never get around to watching Smackdown!  I want to say she was teaming with Maria or someone like her that had been there for quite awhile yet never really even became competent in the ring.  Anyway, it was pretty amazing, because Eve was already immediately better than Maria or whoever it was that had been there so long from match one.  So, aside from her stunning beauty, which according to my #WrestlingBros homey Alex* is even more disarming in person, I was pretty enamored that she immediately had more skills than the average WWE eye candy from the start.  Her autographs are far, faaaaar more expensive than Booker’s, and the only one even close enough for me extend for got nabbed on COMC before I my money into paypal.

As a pretty nifty aside, Eve retweeted the tweet when I tweeted this card to the above mentioned ALo and it’s currently sitting at 17 total retweets and 19 favorites, which is, whoa…

Tara/Victoria WWE Heritage Chrome Autograph.

This was my very first autograph of my favorite Diva of the legendary Victoria/Trish Stratus/Molly Holly/Lita/Gail Kim era legit awesome wrestling.  Good times.  Her autos used to be a lot harder to come by before she made the jump to TNA and became Tara, and picked up several more in the $3-8 range in recent months, even a couple more WWE offerings.  That said, when I got this way back when I felt super lucky to pick it up for a hair under $15 (not counting shipping, which I’m guessing was about normal).  So why was she my favorite then and still remains high enough on the list to dedicate a binder page entirely comprised of hits to her?  She was easily the toughest and most underrated of the bunch (only two title reigns over like seven or eight years, if I recall correctly), and the second best wrestler after Molly (at the time; Gail didn’t really get many chances to shine until the Knockouts division started up in TNA).  I’m also way envious of my Chicago homies, because I want to go to her new restaurant!

I guess that’ll about do it for now.  Thanks for stopping by! 🙂

Until our next…

In The Meantime…

I got seven packages sent out on Feb. 29th.  Hopefully they’ve all reached their destinations by now.  In the meantime, I finally broke out of the writing funk briefly and got nearly 1000 words in on Missionworks one night, but mostly I’ve been getting my art on.  And it has mostly just been one big picture.  I recently started watching Ring Ka King, and I absolutely love it.  It’s a TNA-backed Indian wrestling promotion.  So I had the big idea to take a 9″x12″ piece of cardstock and cram as much of the roster as possible on that thing.  I’m only maybe 30% done with it, and it’s taking forever to find the right pics, but here’s a preview, if you missed it on Twitter the other day.

First Ring Ka King champ Matt Morgan, Commissioner Jazzy Lahoria & his bodyguard the Deadly Danda, and Ring Ka King goodwill ambassador and apparently a rather famed cricketer Harbhajan Singh.

Singh again, The Sheiks, & Alyssa Flash/Raisha Saeed.

It was too big to fit in the scanner, so I had to do multiple scans of different parts.  Anyway, there ya go.  Not much of a post, but it’s something.  Hopefully I’ll finally get to the trade bait from COMC soon.  Until then, back to the drawing board.

Drawing in the dark…

Other COMC Keepers

Here are the last of the keepers from my latest Check Out My Cards order/binge.

First up, some glossy Allen & Ginter..

All three came from the same set break, as you can see..

A couple new cards of my favorite pro wrestler of all-time, the five time, five time, five time, five time, five time WCW Heavyweight Champion of the world and overall most decorated champion in WCW history, Booker T!

The Muscles, Ink back..

A few random comic cards. No, that Hulk card isn't phallic at all. Why do you ask?

A few comic backs..

And finally, hottie hits..

My COMC keepers, ladies & gentlemen.  Stay tuned for trade bait and the inks for my latest pair of Marvel sketch covers.  Thank you and goodnight.

Until our next…

Trade at the Plate

I think this is the last trade I have all scanned up and ready for the postin’.  It comes from Brian @ Play at the Plate.  It’s a little different than the standard trade.  He touched upon some collections that rarely see any trade action.  When I first went through things, my first thought was that the selection of cards I received was “inspired”.  Behold!

Football! And random hot chick.

B hit on almost all my non-Bears collections with Moon, Moss, Cunningham, and Dunn.  Greg Olsen, I think is more athletic than skilled, but I like him.  And a Beautiful Person.  I covered the formation of the Beautiful People when I used to recap the show for a wrestling satire site back in the day.  Let’s just say they didn’t have the most amazing of starts, but they got better.  Only ever got three feedback, two right after I announced I was quitting.  I thought I’d try to get a gig at 411mania afterward, but I never did.  Was so totally burnt out after I quit and eventually got sidetracked with this whole blogging thing.  Maybe  More wrestling to come.

Cubs, Rhynos, Wrestlers, and Aki!

Aki for the now defunct Asian player collection.  Aside from the certain ones I collect, I just save them for Dinged Corners and Shot Not Taken now.

I think I had the Rhynos already, but they are always welcome, and if they are dupes, I will see that they find a good home.

More cards from the wrestling blaster, of which I received the entirety.  AJ, Booker, and Sting are keepers all, though only AJ and Booker do I actively collect.  What an antiquated sentence.

Also, Sarge! 😀

There we go!

Some excellent additions to the Hawk, Vladdy, Carew, and Billy Williams collections.  The Finest card in the center is #ed out of /1999 I believe.  I think Billy Williams is my favorite from this bunch though.  One of my greatest cards is a Billy Williams one, but other than that, I’m pretty lacking in his cards.  He and Fergie Jenkins don’t get nearly enough love amongst Hall of Famers.

More Wrestling, a lil' WBC, Angel and Kaz Ishii

Mmmhmm… Sarita.  Yes plz.

I said I’m just saving the Asian players for Ray and P&L, but I hope Night Owl can use this Kaz, because I sent it to him along with a couple cards he was wanting yesterday.

Angel Guzman is pretty good.  I have faith in the late innings if he’s pitching.

Still need a BUNCH of the chromey WBCs.  I guess this means I will have to update my wantlist… *sigh*

I dunno what Rob Terry’s been up to, since I haven’t watch iMPACT! in awhile or read any recaps.  He was pretty much just a big scary lookin’ dude that was too green to do that much last time I checked.  It matters little though, the hits were just icing on the cake, in this instance.

Finally, I definitely wasn’t expecting the Debra-worn swatch!  I had no idea there were any bloggers that collected wrestling cards in any sort of meaningful way, except for maybe Offy, and I definitely wasn’t expecting to see a card from as far back as when Debra was around.  That is really cool.

Thanks Brian, this was a great trade!

Stay tuned for a little trade bait late tonight/early tomorrow.

Fly me to the moon…