The Phenom

While searching for reference images I came across this site where the author had made custom cards from the 1981 season five episode of The Incredible Hulk entitled "The Phemon".  David Bann ... err ... 'Bedecker' befriends a talented young (dimwitted) baseball player and ends up having to protect him from a corrupt manager.

1981 Topps

I had all but forgotten about the episode.  If I've never mentioned it, I love The Incredible Hulk television series.  I would have to say it's in my top four, along with Freaks and Geeks, The White Shadow, and Columbo.

The author of the original post did his cards in the 1982 Topps style.  I wanted to try them in the 1981 style since it is the year that the episode originally aired.  I didn't want to use the exact same images, but despite extensive searching I could not find any better ones.

I love that the fictional baseball team was called the Roosters. That, and the Hulk swinging the lumber, are my favorite parts of these two cards.

I got the Hulk card signed by Lou Ferrigno and this year's Motor City Comic Con and the Joe Dumming card signed by Brett Cullen through the mail.

Casey Jones

I've seen the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie about 1,000 times.  My mom dubbed it on VHS off of cable, and for awhile my younger brother had to watch it like every day.  I didn't mind, it's a cool movie and I dug the turtles too.  In some respects Casey Jones (played by Elias Koteas) stole the show,  Casey Jones is just such a cool character.

Sticking with my penchants for matching custom trading cards to the year of the subject, the old school hockey goalie mask wearing Casey Jones got plugged into a 1990 Topps hockey inspired template.

Despite being a citizen of "Hockey Town" I've never been a huge hockey guy.  Hockey takes money to play and we didn't have a lot of that growing up (hence my love for basketball).  But, I love the look of most older hockey card designs; most have a great vintage feel to them.  Love the way this turned out and I was glad to add another hockey character to the PCb catalog.

for a comparison

Predator Turns 30

One of the greatest action movies of all time was released on this day in  1987.  So, in honor of this I'm sharing this picture of my 3 Predator cards I was lucky enough to get autographs on from Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke, and Peter Cullen.

Now I think I'll go Watch Predator ... on VHS of course.

Tracey Eddon

In 2009 photos from 1982 of Carrie Fisher and her stunt double Tracey Eddon sunbathing in identical Slave Leia bikinis were leaked to the internet.  If you fall in a certain age bracket chances are that Princess Leia was your first crush, so multiply that times two and you can understand why this behind-the-scenes shot caused such a stir.

The photo is from the set of Return of the Jedi.  It's in Yuma, Arizona which served as Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine.  Carrie and Tracey are soaking up rays between scenes on the deck of Jabba's Sail Barge.

I made this card as sort of a custom supplement to Topps' 1983 Return of the Jedi card set.

Huge TTM success from Miss Eddon

The Thomas Ian Nicholas Experience

What started out as a little hobby is  ... still very much just a little hobby.  But, it is pretty cool to get a brush with celebrity.

As I detailed in my Motor City Comic Con post I gave Thomas Nicholas one of my Henry Rowengartner cards upon getting him to sign one for me.  I later tagged him in an Instagram post. To my surprise he commented on it saying how later a kid came up to his table saying how cool it was that he had his own trading card and inquired about getting more for the upcoming Alamo City Comic Con in San Antonio.  Through a series of DMs back and forth we made a deal and I overnighted him a crisp stack of Henrys.

As part of the deal I got a couple more Rookie of the Year cards auto'd for my personal collection with some pretty awesome inscriptions.