Hello, all!
This is my first post here in quite some time.
For those who don't know me from my posts on UC, a quick introduction:
My name is Robert S. Lancaster. I have actively collected unusual decks of playing cards (mostly ones with custom courts) since 1978 (although I purchased the first deck in what later became my collection/obsession in 1968, when I was ten years old.
I now have more than 2,500 unique decks in my collection, mostly stored in thirty boxes from BCW, each of which hold approximately eighty poker-sized decks.
I first became aware that I was not the only person in the world with this unusual hobby in 1996, when I started what I believe was the first web site devoted to the hobby ("The Bob Lancaster Gallery of Unusual Playing Cards") and started receiving emails from people all over the world who also collected playing cards!
I ended up joining both the IPCS (the International Playing-Card Society) and 52 Plus Joker, creating 52+J's first web site in 1997.
My old-school web site was hosted on AOL, and so was destroyed when AOL deleted all of their members' web sites in October 2008 (I missed the warning that this was going to happen, having had the bad sense of timing to be in a hospital, in a coma, when AOL warned its members about the upcoming mass deletion.
I have recovered much of the old web site using "The Wayback Machine" (
www.archive.org), and plan/hope to open a new-and-improved version of it online in the coming months.
As for the "Fantastic Fur" deck:
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First, I should say that I am pleased and proud to count Peter Wood (the artist behind the deck) as a friend, having corresponded with him, off and on, ever since he found a card from his first deck ("The Teddy Bear Playing Cards") on my web site in the late 1990s.
I own several of his decks ("The Teddy Bear Playing Cards", "2000 Pips", "Busy Bears", "Goblins and...", "Pips-N-Paws", "The Chamber of 52 Cards", "The Journey", and "Wild!", as well as some Souvenir decks published by Newt's Games for which Peter designed the tuck box, and a children's book which Peter illustrated, so I will definitely be pledging on "Fantastic Fur" on Kickstarter.
That being said, here are my thoughts on the deck:
=====[ THE NAME ]=====
First, I love the deck's name! When Peter was working on it, he ran a few names he was considering for it past me, and "Fantastic Fur" was my favorite by far.
=====[ "SEMI-TRANSFORMATIONAL" DECKS ]=====
Second (and Peter knows this), Although I (usually) love "fully-transformational" decks (those in which the pips on each card are in the same location, orientation and size as those in a "standard" deck), I am (generally) NOT a fan of "semi-transformational" decks (those, like this one, in which each card has the right number of pips, but they are located, oriented, sized and skewed in whatever way the artist feels best serves his or her concept for the card). I have designed many "fully transformational" cards (though not a complete deck), and so, I think that I understand and appreciate better than most the challenge behind designing and creating a fully-transformed card which "works". Creating an entire deck of fully-transformed cards, in which all of the cards are not only fully-transformed, but also serve the deck's "theme", takes far more creativity (and work!) than most of us realize. Appreciating all of that, I tend to think of "semi-transformational" cards as somewhat a product of creative laziness (of course, if I ever designed and created one myself, my appreciation for them might increase tremendously).
Peter's "The Teddy Bear Playing Cards" deck was a "fully-transformational" deck, and I loved it. But most, perhaps all of his decks since then have been "semi-transformational", and I can't help but be disappointed in them, if only for that reason.
=====[ THE THEME ]=====
The deck's theme (teddy bears as comic book superheroes and villains) would seem to be a natural for a Peter Wood deck, but I don't think that theme was fully-realized here. The computer-graphic backgrounds of the cards was chosen, according to the deck's Kickstarter page, to give the cards more of a "comic book look", but fail to do so it my eyes. Offhand, I don't recall that effect used in many comic books. To me, it gives the cards more of the look of cheesy web pages (such as some on my old playing card site). As I believe others have said here, I think that the "comic book" theme would have been better served by narrow white borders, with the inner edge outlined in a thin, black line, and the background of the card a simple background (buildings, etcetera) as are usually used in the panels of a comic book. A rectangular white or pastel "Post-It-like" narrative tag containing simple narrative (such as "MEANWHILE...") could be placed in a corner of some cards, further enhancing the "comic book" look and feel of the deck.
I think that the scene, title and dialog (explaining the hero's powers) used on most of the cards would seem more appropriate to the cover of a comic book than to a panel within a comic book. It may have better served the theme (and have been more fun as well) to make each card the cover of the first issue of that Superhero's comic, including a crisp logo of their name, a small logo of the comic's publisher (a'la Marvel or DC), a price, and even a "comics code seal" in a corner. That would serve to make the blatant describing of the hero's powers/abilities more in keeping with where such things are generally done in real comic books. If, on the other hand, you want the cards to be like panels within a comic book, you should cut way back on the explaining of the hero's powers, and, with a background scene (and perhaps secondary characters, such as a villain), make it look like a panel WITHIN A STORY, and not like a stand-alone advertisement for the hero (which is what a comic book's cover is, if you think about it...)
I know that it would be a LOT of work, but if you came up with at least a general outline of the story in the comic books depicted on each card (whether that card depicts the cover or just a panel), that storyline would inform the way the card was designed and drawn, and would greatly increase both the variety of the images AND the feeling that we are looking at parts of actual comic books rather than contrived comic book-like images.
Personally, I enjoyed the nods to heroes from actual comic books ("The Incredible Hug", for one) more than I did the ones which were solely the product of Peter's imagination. For one thing, they were more open to "inside jokes/references", which would make the deck more attractive to comic book fans (a HUGE market). The more that those jokes/references tied into the world of teddy bears ("Hug", for example), the better. And the more cohesive it makes the deck's theme, I believe.
====[ A FINAL THOUGHT ]=====
Perhaps one more SuperVillain is called for:
Named "Mr. Mollusk" (or, perhaps, "Dr. Mollusk"), his supervillainous power would be discouraging the hero with pointless and vacuous non-constructive criticism. The hero ends up losing interest in what he or she was trying to accomplish.
