Merry Christmas! I hope your holidays were Awesome! Mine brought a funny bit of Awesome... the Judgment Day card set. These came out in 1997 with the publication of Judgment Day.
Let's back up for a moment. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, comic book card sets became very popular. They started off publishing artwork lifted from comics. Sometimes there was writing on the back and sometimes there was part of an image that combined nine cards to make a larger image. They weren't really all that interesting, but it was fun to buy a pack in the comic shop and open them up.
Then came the first Marvel Universe set, which featured new art and specific information about the heroes, their powers, etc. (There's a great article about how it happened here) The set was incredibly popular. The second set featured popular artists such as Jim Lee, Art Adams, etc. and was even more popular. When Jim Lee then did an entire set of X-Men cards, the popularity of card sets had exploded. They moved to fully painted sets and ones with sketch cards. (Eventually, like the comic market itself, the trading card market for comic characters imploded.)
So, it's a bit of a surprise that this set is almost entirely made up of artwork from the miniseries:
The first 16 cards feature art from Judgment Day Alpha. On the backs, we find out who drew the art and a bit about what's happening in the story:
The first 46 cards focus on Rob Liefeld's (and his imitators') art from the "present" storyline. The flashbacks don't appear until later.
Next, we get 15 cards for Judgment Day Omega:
And another 15 for Judgment Day Final Judgment:
Then we get 13 images from the flashbacks, featuring the art of Gil Kane, Chris Sprouse, etc. It really feels like they skimped on the flashback art, which was my favorite part of the series:
Then comes a subset of 9 cards with brand new art by longtime Extreme artist Dan Fraga. They let Fraga draw just head shots and busts and one wonders whether this art was even made for this set as Prophet barely appeared in the series at all:
But this was the 1990s, so there had to be some gimmick chase cards, right? They made six "chromium" cards from some of the many covers. The cards are basically see through with bright metallic ink on the back that made it kind of shimmer. They are, admittedly, kind of neat.
I know the focus was on Liefeld art, but they could have at least done the third Dave Gibbons cover to complete the three-panel image. Sigh.
They made two promo cards to give away to promote the set:
And Liefeld autographed about 500 of these cards:
I think I paid about $15 for this set on eBay as a gift to myself (not including the autograph card). Mostly I laugh at this stuff now, but 15 year old me would have loved it. So it was worth every penny!
Hope your holidays were as Awesome as mine!
