I still have not finished unpacking my office. Some books are still in boxes, as well an extensive personal papers, scrapbooks, albums and assorted correspondence and ephemera.
A significant bulk of my personal collections is composed of trading cards. As a kid growing up in Mexico City, trading cards were as rare and mostly unaffordable as treasure. One day I hope to write in detail about my adventures as a trading card collector in pre-NAFTA Mexico.
For now I will just say that trading cards were as important in my development as books, magazines, toys and records. They helped define my interest in material culture, information science, book history and even digital humanities. For me they embody, even more than comic books, the seductive fragility, but also potentially lasting impact, of otherwise disposable print- the beauty of ephemera, and of ridiculous, excessive, frustrating, polluting ‘multimodal’ consumerism.
For more than ten years I have explored creating digital versions of trading cards, featuring philosophers, authors, etc. Back in day when Tumblr was still relevant, I enjoyed what I perceived as similarities with the experience of trading card collecting, and saw it as an ideal medium to post disposable digital images, that I pictured as collectable (for an early example, see this).
It was only a question of time before I would start thinking in making my own (printed) trading cards1. It matches my interest in self-publishing, not only in the sense of publishing my own work online but in the sense of actually designing, making, printing and distributing physical print publications. While I was in the process of creating and publishing the first 40 comic strips of the first series of The Lockdown Chronicles last year, I thought it would be nice to create a series of cards featuring each of the protagonists of the comics.
This Summer I designed some digital card prototypes, and last month I ordered some test prints of a card to see what they would like, and to identify any emerging issues. Today I finally received them (prototypes for card 22 in the series, based on the Lockdown Chronicle 22), and they look like this:
It was fantastic to see that what I had devised through purely digital means now occupied space, it has weight, texture. They are the same size as normal trading cards and do feel like proper trading cards!
Even though I had tried to be careful with the bleeds and centering, it unfortunately became apparent that I need to reconsider the back template, in this case include a shorter text, and to make sure there is extra safe space for the bleeds, as in this case the small print got slightly cut off.
I am really pleased with how the front looks. Even though it’s unfortunate the small print in the back got a bit cut off and the text is long and not properly centred, I will be giving away some of these. If you want this super rare collector’s item let me know and I’ll be happy to post one for you! (Subject to availability- it is a super limited run of 24!).
Here you can see how the card looks inside a protective card sleeve and toploader, as if it were an actual trading card (hey, it is!)
This project is part of a larger project that’s slowly shaping up. I will keep you updated. I am hoping there are other cardboard collectors out there who may appreciate a bit of small press ephemera. Completely useless, but hopefully, at least in some way, beautiful. An attempt to make sense of history and time and experience, if you will.
*If you received this post by email, and you got this far, thank you. Emailed posts may contain typos and vary slightly from later versions I get to revise later. Indeed, some stuff that needs revising only becomes apparent after it’s been published and distributed.
Here I should thank my longtime friend, colleague and fellow collector and comics, music and trading cards enthusiast Dr Ricardo Trujillo, for the ongoing inspiration.