Williams retired the next year, so Fleer began adding around him other mostly retired players in a Baseball Greats series, which was sold with gum. Two of these sets were produced before Fleer finally tried a 67-card set of currently active players in 1963. However, Topps held onto the rights of most players and the set was not particularly successful. As the contract situation was sorted out, several Topps sets during these years had a few “missing” cards, where the numbering of the set skips several numbers because they had been assigned to players whose cards could not legally be distributed. The competition, both for consumer attention and player contracts, continued until 1956, when Topps bought out Bowman. This left Topps as the predominant producer of baseball cards for the next quarter-century.
Trading cards for other sports
This limited-run collection will feature teenage sensation Luke Littler, fresh from his incredible rookie season. This high-spec collection will include flight relics, shirt relics and one guaranteed on-card autograph per box. Many Topps artists came from the world of comics and continued to work in that field as well. The shift from sports to other topics better suited the creative instincts of the artists and coincided with turmoil in the comic book industry over regulation by the Comics Code Authority. Beginning at Topps when he was a teenager, Art Spiegelman was the company’s main staff cartoonist for more than 20 years. Other staffers in Topps’s Product Development Department at various times included Larry Riley, Mark Newgarden, Bhob Stewart and Rick Varesi.
While “Traded” or “Update” sets were originally conceived to deal with players who changed teams, they became increasingly important for another reason. In order to fill out a 132-card set (the number of cards that fit on a single sheet of the uncut cardboard used in the production process), it would contain a number of rookie players who had just reached the major leagues and not previously appeared on a card. They also included a few single cards of players who previously appeared in the regular set on a multi-player “prospects” card; one notable example is the 1982 Topps Traded Cal Ripken Jr.
Look out for top players and big-hitters such as Ben Stokes, Ravi Bopara, Alyssa Healy, Dane van Niekerk, Jofra Archer, Joe Root, Nat Scriver and Jonny Bairstow. Among Topps’s most notable achievements in the area of satire and parody have been Wacky Packages, a takeoff on various household consumer products, and Garbage Pail Kids, a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. Another popular series was the Civil War News set, also with Norman Saunders’ artwork. However, Topps has noted that increasing public attention to childhood nutrition undercuts its candy sales. Under pressure by shareholders, the company considered selling off its confectionery business in 2005, but was unable to find a buyer to meet its price and decided to cut management expenses instead. Look out for ‘parallel’ versions of the cards which will be shipped at random to lucky customers.
Thus cards from the last series are much scarcer and are typically more valuable (even commons) than earlier series of the same year. Topps was left with a substantial amount of surplus stock in 1952, which it largely disposed of by dumping many cards into the Atlantic. In later years, Topps either printed series in smaller quantities late in the season or destroyed excess cards.
In 1995, the Topps Company Inc. completed its takeover of Merlin Publishing. Merlin’s official company name changed to Topps Europe Limited, but its products still carried the Merlin brand until 2008 as it was easily recognized by consumers. From this office products are launched across Europe, including Spain, France, Germany, Norway, and Italy.
The same basic format was used in 1955, this time with the full-length photo also hand-tinted. For 1956, the close-up tinted photo was placed against a tinted full-background ‘game-action’ photo of the player. In 2008,[45] Topps and Zuffa, LLC signed an exclusive agreement to produce mixed martial arts trading cards. Although Topps did not invent the concept of baseball cards, its dominance in the field basically allowed the company to define people’s expectations of what a baseball card would look like. In addition to establishing a standard size, Topps developed various design elements that are considered typical of baseball cards.
Football
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Use of statistics
Each set contained 52 cards, like a deck of playing cards, and in fact the cards could be used to play a game that would simulate the events of a baseball game. Also like playing cards, the cards had rounded corners and were blank on one side, which was colored either red or blue (hence the names given to these sets). The other side featured the portrait of a player within a baseball diamond in the center, and in opposite corners a picture of a baseball together with the event for that card, such as “fly out” or “single.” Topps are incredibly excited to release our first ever darts trading card set.
Topps broker finexo finally returned to basketball cards in 1992, several years after its competitors. This would be perfect timing, because 1992 was the rookie year of Shaquille O’Neal. Starting in 1968–69, the Topps Company started printing an annual Topps hockey set that was similar to the annual O-Pee-Chee hockey set.
Until 2019, Topps made ‘Topps Premier League’ stickers and the Match Attax trading card game,[44] and since 2015 it has produced stickers and trading cards for the UEFA Champions League. Also beginning in 1989 with the entry of Upper Deck into the market, card companies began to develop higher-end cards using improved technology. Following Topps’s example, other manufacturers now began to diversify their product lines into different sets, each catering to a different niche of the market. The initial Topps effort at producing a premium line of bitbuy canada review cards, in 1991, was called Stadium Club. Topps continued adding more sets and trying to distinguish them from each other, as did its competitors.
When used for the cards of individual players, some of the early action photography had awkward results. The photos were sometimes out of focus or included several players, making it difficult to pick out the player who was supposed to be featured on the card. In a few cases, a misidentification meant that the player didn’t even appear in the picture.
Although Topps had produced error cards and variations before, this was its largest single production glitch. A collector’s favourite for its unreal content, beautiful designs and exquisite printing, the latest instalment of UEFA Inception will not disappoint! Football hobbyists can look forward to familiar themes like ‘First XI’, ‘Legacy’, and ‘Star quality’, plus new all-new subsets still to be announced.
- Look out for ‘parallel’ versions of the cards which will be shipped at random to lucky customers.
- Thereafter, Topps began simply mixing game photography with posed shots in its sets.
- The other side featured the portrait of a player within a baseball diamond in the center, and in opposite corners a picture of a baseball together with the event for that card, such as “fly out” or “single.”
- Working in partnership with eBay, Topps launched a new brand of sports cards called eTopps in December 2000.
- Spiegelman, Gelman and Brown also hired freelance artists from the underground comix movement, including Bill Griffith and Kim Deitch and Robert Crumb.
The Topps and O-Pee-Chee hockey sets shared a similar design from 1968–69 to 1981–82 and from 1984–85 to 1991–92. Before statistics, biographical information, and commentary became the dominant element on the backs of cards, Topps also featured artwork there. This primarily involved using various types of cartoons drawn by its stable of artists. These appeared on card backs as late as 1982, but gradually declined in the prominence of their placement and the proportion of cards on which they appeared. In 1993, Topps finally managed again to incorporate a player photo on the back as well as the front of the card, after some competitors had been doing so for a number of years. After starting out with simple portraits, in 1954 Topps put two pictures on the front of the card – a hand-tinted ‘color’ close-up photo of the player’s head, and the other a black-and-white full-length pose.
The longest-lived Topps product line remains Bazooka bubble gum, small pieces of gum in patriotic red, white, and blue packaging. Unlike the gum sold with baseball cards, it was of better quality and capable of selling on its own merit. In 1953, Topps began selling smaller penny pieces with the Bazooka Joe comic strip on the wrapper as an added attraction. Originally, Topps was purely a gum company, and its first product was simply called “Topps gum”. In imitation of Bowman and other competitors, Topps eventually began producing humor products unrelated to sports.