Walker, Texas Ranger

I thought this would be a fun custom to do.  I mean, who doesn't love a good Chuck Norris meme or custom trading card?

Although I've landed on Walker, Texas Ranger while channel surfing, I'm pretty sure I've never actually watched an episode.  That's okay.  I feel I've watched enough Chuck Norris movies to say I've paid my fan dues.  Plus, I love the Karate Kommandos cartoon from the mid '80s -- even if it was only a 5 episode mini-series in order to sell the action figures.

This card is a play on the baseball Rangers team name in the very same spirit as the  André the Giant card I did, and the Schwarzenegger/DeVito Twins before that. 

In choosing an template to emulate I gave myself two prerequisites; one, it had to be an '80s Topps inspired design and it had to be a year that featured a team logo because I wanted to use a Texas Ranger badge as said logo.  That leaves ya with 1985 and 1987.  I mocked them both up and decided to go with '85.  The reason why might seem counterintuitive, but I felt like the '87 design looked too much like it could be an actual Walker, Texas Ranger  trading card and kind of lost, for me, the 'repurposed baseball card' feel.

Fletch (Yet Again)

With all the craziness that is the world we're currently all living in I just haven't been able to focus on my custom trading card making hobby.  That's a shame because at the start of the new year I had 1,001 ideas for cards and different things for the PCb. brand, but ... here we are.

Most of my ideas are on the back burner save for this one that came via email from a collector of the cards I make.  It was one I just really didn't want to put off.  Unbeknownst to me there were some sports themed scenes from Fletch that didn't make the final film.  One of those was of Fletch posing as a relief pitcher for the Dodgers.  I thought eventually I'd be doing another card or two starring Chevy Chase but I thought I didn't think it'd be another I.M. Fletcher card.  But... there could be one last Fletch card yet to be made.  There's also a deleted scene of Fletch as a goalie for the L.A. Kings and if a decent quality picture of it ever surfaces I'll be all over it.

The card is in the style of Topps' 1985 baseball design.  

Hopefully we, as a world community, collectively kick some coronavirus ass so we can all resume our normal lives.

Jackie Stalegum Lives!

I’m a sucker for mascots, logos and graphic design in general.  There’s a few nostalgia clothing brands I follow online that I've really been influenced by with their character branding.  I wanted to do something like that with my card brand.  I wanted to establish a cool logo / mascot that could be instantly associated with Phantom Cardboard.

I came up with my first logo when I started to realize that making custom cards wasn't a passing fancy, but rather a passion to create and connect to childhood loves.  I love branding and wanted to make something symbolic of my cards.  My first attempt at this was a little cute ghost character.  It kinda looked like a cross between that video game character Kirby and the ghosts found in the Mario Bros. castles.  I sent that image to friends to get their takes on it.  The response was just okay, and I wanted something better than that.

I was originally going to spell it Fantom Cardboard

I went back to the drawing board and took a bit of a more literal approach.  A Phantom of the Opera style mask wearing a baseball hat was the new direction I took.

Version 1.0

Not too long after creating my logo I saw that Matthew Skiff had some openings for commissions.  Matthew is a prolific graphic designer and has done some of the coolest nostalgia pieces that you can find on the internet.  His stuff is epic and I’ve admired his talent for years, so I jumped at the chance to have him design something for the PCb. brand.  This was back in September of 2017.

Basically I was looking to have my basic concept polished and refined by Matthew’s skill.  He took and executed my ideas flawlessly, and was a pleasure to work with with each and every one of my little tweak requests.  Needless to say I couldn’t have been happier with the results.  He translated the vision I had perfectly.

He did an updated and cleaner version of my text logo and my Phantom head logo.  There’s the standard version of the logo and one blowing a bubblegum bubble paying homage to the “stale gum” we all loved in our wax packs. 

While he was at it I also had him expand the logo into a full mascot character.  He got that 100% how I requested too.  Thus Jackie Stalegum was born.  "Jackie" a tribute to Jackie Robinson with the last name being a homage to Topps’ pink brittle premium at the bottom of a wax pack.  I think Jackie has a fun Scooby-Doo villain vibe to him.  I got the idea to add a cape to the presentation from an old Batman card.

1966 Topps Batman B Series

Matthew ran a few color schemes past me.  The one I went with was the one that closely matched my vision mixed with his suggestion for the cape’s outer color.  The color’s a little more towards teal where I had it a dark green which came off a bit Christmasy.

This rookie card was always one thing I wanted to do with the design.  I also want to eventually use it clothing items but that’s something I’m really quite ignorant about so it’s on the back burner until I do a little more fact finding.  So, why did this card take two years?  Basically, I have not been able to take my attention away from the custom cards I make to devote time to creating this particular PCb. brand card.

Finally I just decided I’ve been sitting on this illustration for long enough and I wanted to make this a card.

my little slugger

I considered a number of different templates but decided to go with the one that started it all for me, the 1985 Topps baseball inspired design.  In 2015 I was just messing around with my daughter’s little league pictures trying to make her a custom baseball card.   That came out decent so I did it again this time with my other daughter’s cheerleading picture.  I don't have a formal graphic design background but I’ve always been a creative type and these cards give me a great outlet for that side of me.  From my daughters’ two cards it has snowballed into, hell, I don’t even know how many custom cards I’ve made to date.  As when I collected cards growing up, I never stopped to count, just always wanted more.  Trading cards have been a constant in my life as far back as I can remember.  They’re something I’m sure I’ll always have a love for because I can use them at markers to simpler times.  So many great memories for me can be tied to collecting cards.

At first I was just recycling the ‘85 design and using it to make cards of all the things I wish had been made into trading cards when I was growing up. The design was easily customizable.  I would sometimes leave the team name nameplate blank because I thought it would make for a cool autograph box when I sent my customs out in hopes of getting them signed by celeb types.  From there I would experiment with other designs wanting to match the year of what I was making a card for to a card design produced from the same year.  I just like tying those two things together.  It makes the cards more “real” to me.

Jackie’s card originally had "Phantom Cardboard" inside of the team name nameplate, but then it dawned on me that that rectangle kind of resembles a wax pack gum stick.  That is my favorite part of the card.  Well, that and of course Matthew’s gnarly design.

After making my daughter’s cards my sole reason for making my custom cards initially was to see if I could get them autographed through-the-mail.  It became a fun little nerdy hobby for me.  So I thought what about this Stalegum card coming full circle with that 1985 design and an autograph?  While corresponding back and forth with Matthew about another project I asked if he’d mind signing a few of these cards for me to offer in a Jackie Stalegum RC Phan Pack to which he graciously obliged.

Now I that I had the Phan Pack’s centerpiece I wanted to surround it by some rad Jackie Stalegum swag.

So, without further long-windedness here’s what’s included in the aforementioned Phan Pack:

• Jackie Stalegum autographed rookie card.  This card has a glossier “Tiffany” finish and is sealed in a 55 pt. Ultra Pro one-touch case.  The backside is signed by Matthew Skiff in Stalegum Pink and limited to 12 hand-numbered copies.
• Jackie Stalegum regular rookie card.  Standard vintage finish, limited to 50 hand-numbered copies.

• 1.5" vintage yellow pin
• 2.25" Trapper Keeper Jackie pin

• Holographic bubble sticker
• 2” mini sticker
• 2” mini magnet

• Stalegum Pink PCb. school store pencil 

.

Sig. Showcase: Happy April Fool's

The Curious Custom Of Sidd Finch

This card came by request by a very good friend to the Phantom Cardboard brand.  Everytime I seem to be running short on card ideas or inspirations something great like this is thrown my way.

Hayden “Sidd” Finch is part of modern age baseball lore.  I was familiar with the story but until this friend reminded me with his request for a card I had totally forgotten about Sidd, if not I would have totally done this card a long time ago.

For any readers out there who may be unaware of Sidd Finch, he is a fictional pitching savant crafted by journalist George Plimpton for Sports Illustrated. 

Seeing that the publishing day for Sports Illustrated fell on April 1st -- April Fool’s Day -- in 1985 SI’s managing editor tasked Plimpton with doing a write up about April Fool’s jokes in the sporting world throughout the years.  Not able to find enough good material to put a story together George Plimpton was given the go ahead to create his own April Fool’s leg pull on the SI readership. 

Plimpton’s imagination conjured up a story of a highly eccentric guy  who learned the art of the perfect pitch while studying yoga in Tibet.  “Sidd” (a nickname short for Siddhartha) could throw a baseball a blistering record 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy obliterating the previous top recorded speed by 65 mph.  He did this while wearing a clunky boot on one foot and his other foot was bare.

To level up the elaborate nature of the hoax Sports Illustrated photographer Lane Stewart enlisted his friend, a gangly 6’4” Illinois junior high art teacher, Joe Berton, to take pictures as the phenom Finch at the Mets training camp in St. Petersburg, FL with the Mets players and staff playing along.  The story went that Finch was there deciding whether he was going to play professional baseball or pursue the simpler endeavor of playing French horn for which his prowess for equaled that of his pitch.

Despite the publication date, the first letters of the article’s sub headline spelling out “Happy April Fool’s Day”, or one of the definitions in the the English Oxford Dictionary for ‘Finch’ being “a small lie” the article caused quite an uproar.  Remember, this is quite a long time before the age of internet sleuthing.  Reactions ranged from beat writers from New York being butt-hurt with the Mets for allowing Sports Illustrated to have the scoop on such a huge story to unnamed team general managers calling the league’s office with concern for their player’s safety stepping into the batting box with a guy throwing 168 mph heat.

The next week SI ran a small article announcing Finch’s retirement from baseball and then finally in the subsequent week after that they let the readers in on the joke.  George Plimpton went on to write a Sidd Finch novel where Sidd reconsiders a career as a professional ball player that was first published in 1987.

1985 Topps

The request  was for a 1984 Topps style card.  The PCb reader loves the style, as do I.  It’s always fun to get to use two different images on the same card.  That card was a crowd pleaser to both him and I.

Because the Sidd Finch events are synonymous with that 1985 issue of Sports Illustrated I wanted to also do a card in a 1985 specific design.  With Sidd’s record shattering 168 mph fastball being such a central detail to his lore the thought of a card inspired by the ‘Record Breaker’ subset gave me a smile not unlike the one The Grinch gets when thinking of doing Grinchy deeds.  I used the same iconic photo for both cards of a bare footed Finch in a big wind up on that white sand Florida beach.

Matthew Modine

Today I got quite the surprise on my Instagram account. Matthew Modine reposted my Dr. Martin Brenner Stranger Things TTM success from him.  Talk about floored!

As you can see he tagged my account and captioned it "let's make this happen".  I'm not sure what that means? I mean, as far as my cards go I would consider myself very small-time.  It's more of a hobby.  It takes me forever just to make a few, so as far as mass production goes I would need the support of an entity with the know how.  It's just me, my laptop, my printer, and a guillotine style paper cutter.  Not sure what would come out of this, if anything.  I was just more than thrilled with the shout out from one of my favorite actors.

As for the show, I loved Stranger Things.  I'm usually not really big into sci-fi, but being that the setting for the show was Midwest America in 1983, they got me ... hook, line, and sinker.  I thought it was awesome, and what a cast!  I cannot wait until Season 2 which is set to hit Netflix on Halloween.

That brings us to the card.  It's inspired by the 1983 (naturally) Topps baseball set.  Where the player position would normally be I made note of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana and trimmed the card in the Stranger Things themed red and black border.

That card was actually one of two cards Mr. Modine signed for me.  I also did one for his character Louden Swain in the 1985 movie Vision Quest.  This one utilized the 1985 Topps baseball inspired design.  The colors are Thompson HS's school colors and I was able to recreate the Warriors logo from a screen grab of one of their wrestling singlets.

Magnum P.I.

Here's another with the 1985 Topps Baseball design.  Again, when I first started making customs I used this template almost exclusively.  Although Donruss did put out a Magnum P.I. set in 1983, I wanted to make a card teasing Thomas Magnum as a baseball player since he's always wearing the Tigers hat while doing his Hawaii P.I. work... while driving a Ferrari.  What a gig.

Kate Upton

No mystery as to why I would choose to do a Kate Upton custom.  Shouldn't be anyways.  The first card is designed after the 1985 Topps Rocky IV set.  I call it my TKO! Series - that's corny for Total Knock Out!, and it's usually my go to template for the fairer sex that I'd like to make a card of, models and such.

This card is another using my 1985 Topps template.  I used it a lot at first until I started trying out other vintage designs.  I did this one for the Justin Verlander connection to my hometown Tigers.  I'd like to consider Kate (also an MI native) an honorary Tiger.

I've sent copies to an agency that represents her.  It's been awhile, but I'm willing to wait if they actually come through.

Ken Howard

 When I first started making my custom cards my main goal was to get on card autographs of the cast of The White Shadow, my all-time favorite television show.  If you're reading this and are unfamiliar with the show it was produced by Bruce Paltrow and aired on CBS from 1978 to 1981.  It starred Ken Howard as a retired NBA player that takes a job at an intercity Los Angeles high school as their basketball coach.   It was a groundbreaking show in that it was the first to feature a predominately minority cast and it dealt with real societal issues that had seldom been broached prior. It predates me a bit, but in the early '00s I happen to catch it on ESPN Classics and it was love at first watch.

Since no cards existed I decided to make some of my own.  I'd never really done this before.  The design is inspired by the 1985 Topps baseball card set, as it was pretty simple to reproduce.  I also like the fact that I could fill the team name block white to create a perfect autograph box.

I made three "Ken Reeves" cards.  One as a Chicago Bull, the NBA team Ken Reeves was drafted by.  One as a Chicago Cub, due to the character frequently sporting the cap.  And one as the coach of Carver High.  Carver didn't really have a logo, so I had to create one.