Tuesday, September 20, 2022

New technology in the collecting game

As mentioned on my previous post, I haven't bought much in the way of trading cards in quite some time. Everything seems a little different now in the collecting word.  I don't seem to see a lot of card packs in the Targets and WalMarts like I used to. Also, place like Vintage Stock don't seem to stock much in the way of cards unless it's Pokeman or Magic the Gathering. 

The one new development that might only be new to me is the invention of the horizontal binder page.


Yep. I'm so starved for hobby related material that I genuinely got excited when I saw these at the Vintage Stock. 

I really didn't want to leave totally empty handed as I couldn't even find a good graphic novel or comic to buy. No packs of non-sports OR sports to be had. No singles, nothing really at the closest Vintage Stock, so I got 4 of these pages for now, and one of those Funko blind boxes. This particular set is from Marvel's What If...? animated show. 

I haven't seen the show, but I do like Marvel related stuff.  I was looking for a cool Zombie Captain America, but pulled an Ice Loki ? 

 


I remember the old "What if... ?" comic books. It was a pretty good premise for an anthology like book back in the day. I'll have to check out this show sometime and see if it's like the old comics, or maybe it's a new "alternate universe" type of concept.



About those binder pages... I really should have bought more. I can totally see using these for my little '74 set that I'm putting together. Honestly they would work good for my favorite horizontal cards too. 

 My '74 "set" that I'm going for is pretty much just the 12 or so cards depicting the World Series from 1973. I found a couple of these at a local card shop years ago, and I forget where the other ones came from. I just remember thinking that having the Met's from the '73 season would be cool as I'm sort of trying to complete that set, and I felt like this would be a nice companion to that. 





The possibilities are somewhat endless.  It wouldn't make sense to use these on a set that has both vertical and horizontal cards, but sometimes those little insert sets would be all horizontal. Of course, the 55 and 56 sets were horizontal, so they make good candidates for the new pages.



I kind of forgot how many of these vintage cards that I had in the vintage box.  These are all from different sets, but it's a lot easier to look at them in pages.

 

Eventually I'm going to use these for my random "Cool Action Shot" set that I'm making out of whatever cards I think looks cool. Since it's been several years since I totally went through my collection it might take a minute to actually find which binder/box. 

8 comments:

night owl said...

I'm assuming these are eight-pocket pages, which are ideal for horizontal sets like 1955 and 1956 Topps? ... Your page of 1960 Topps threw me for a bit but after looking at the picture I see there's some air around the cards, so those must be the eight-pockets.

I have a whole box of those for when I was completing the '56 set.

Jeremy said...

Yeah, they're 8 pocket pages. Now that you mention it, the 1960 cards are a little roomy. I'm glad I found these so that I can look at my random vintage easier. It never occurred to me to see if these existed before. I'm envious that you completed a '56 set.

Jon said...

I loved the old What If? books when I was a kid. I've thought about going back and trying to get them all, but so far that's all it's been, just a thought. I saw the trailer for the series, but like most modern Marvel stuff, it didn't look like it would be for me.

Jeremy said...

Most of the new marvel stuff has been a little hard for me to get into. I wish I had disney plus to see some of the wanda stuff. I think you might can find some of those books online through your local library. I started reading some of those old avengers and fantastic four comics that way.

Fuji said...

For a second, I was stoked to hear that they made pages for standard size horizontal cards. Oh well... the 8 pocket pages for vintage Topps are still pretty useful and cool. If Ultra Pro ever did create 8 pocket pages for current cards, I'd definitely pick up some.

As for those What If books, I inherited a comic book collection this summer and there were a few from that series. But the ones I have are from the mid 2000's. Maybe I'll pull them out and read them one of these days.

Jeremy said...

I'm still kind of dumbfounded that I never took the time to look into horizontal pages since I really like horizontal cards so much. I didn't realize that Marvel had rebooted the What if? in the 00's. I pretty much stopped ready new marvel comics in the 90's and only read indie stuff or the older vintage comics. I'm pretty much out of the loop these days on comics.

RR said...

I never knew about the horizontal pages and I never heard of those What If books and I have been collecting since 1968, imagine that. Just added your blog and going to start to follow. Look forward to more posts.

Jeremy said...

Thanks for the follow RR! I didn't realize the What if? books had been around that long.