Cult-Stuff

The Wax Eye Cereal Killers set is now available to order, and the official website is also now online so check it out today! http://wax-eye.com/

If you don’t know about this set then read on: This fantastic release comes from the new company Wax Eye and is set to hit the shelves later this month. It looks mighty impressive to say the least!

What’s it all about?

Take your favourite brands of cereal and twist them just a little and this set is what you get. At least that’s what you get if your the artist Joe Simko! Joe’s work has been seen on countless sets including Garbage Pail Kids and the fantastic Wacky Packages from Topps, along with tons of posters, t-shirts, and album covers… Oh and his own book .

He has moved on from card art to full scale production with this new set and the first print will be just 4,000 3 pack boxes.  The set is comprised of 55 basic cards (all illustrated by Joe) and will be sold in groups of three “packs” (actually little cereal boxes). Each mini cereal box will contain  20 basic cards and at least 1 premium insert card. The inserts and ratios are listed below:

Blacklight Stickers – 1:1
Temporary Tattoos – 1:2
Fridge Magnets – 1:2
Gold Foil Stickers – 1:8
Sketch Cards – 1:16

Thats an impressive and importantly fun line up of inserts, and importantly it’s not imposable to collect. Aside from the Sketch cards (250 different cards obviously) and Blacklight Stickers (All 3 versions are shown below) the other chase cards come in 1 variation each, so completists need not worry to much!

Wax Eye products are not going to show up in most shops, due tot he limited nature of the product and the fact that sales are driven predominately via there own website. I really hope they make some changes to this and start to wholesale to show dealers and shops. This type of product is absolutely something that people will buy on impulse if they see it, it’s eye catching and fun, oh and the price is great. RRP on a three box set is just $24.95!  (a ten box cards will run you $224.55 saving the price of one box)

Check out these base cards and hey Cult-Stuff are pleased to exclusively reveal the art for card 25: Honey-Chrome:

If this set is half as good as it looks then collectors are in for a real treat. I would expect this to sell well so head over to the Wax Eye site and sign up for the newsletter, they will be giving interested parties a weeks notice before ordering begins. These sets should be available in the USA, Canada, the UK and some select other nations. A lot of work has clearly gone into this and I hope they do well, because I for one would love to see more sets from Wax Eye! Check them out on Facebook as well.

These are back from the printers, and the look fantastic. This ultra limited factory set features the art of the super talented Matt Dixon. Every set comes with a signed card and at least one mini chase cards. One in ten will receive an ultra rare canvas parallel card. These will be shipping in April, once the autographs are finished, and we don’t expect to have them for long! Below you will find new preview image including one of the mini chase cards. These are available for preorder now so check out the product page for more details! 

Other News: MZF is shipping shortly, the cards are being packed now. You can also expect more set announcements and promo information soon, along with some interesting images from the new Wax Eye set!

Updates:

This is a quick run down of a lot of news, because a ton of things have been going on around the card world these last few weeks. First of all whats up with us:

MZF is printing, it should be with me Monday or Tuesday next week fully cut and we will be packing and shipping next week. It’s nearly finished now, 2 months late and moving fast! The canvas chase cards are already here and we have been cutting them down and hand assembling them for the last few weeks.

We have more sets coming! Age of Sorcery is moving well but it’s not going to be out in March, we are looking at May for this set, but a new promo is on the way along with extra chase cards.

In other good news the Dixon’s Vixens set is on it’s way back from the printers as well, and it will be shipping out in April. This set has NOT been put on pre-sale until now. It’s very very limited. We will only be offering 500 sets for sale with the other 500 going directly to Matt. For more information on the set check out the link at the top of the page. It is going to be a great value set, with a retail price of just £9.99! We fully expect to be producing a second set with Matt.

The art of J.D Seeber:

This is another limited factory set due out in the last quarter of 2011, and we are very pleased to be able to bring you a great selection of J.D.’s art. You can see images of the forthcoming promo card on the his page link above!

Pulp Detectives!

We are producing a very limited sketch and base card set taking a fun look at the old style pulp classics, guns, dames, detectives, dames, crime and dames. One thing we will be focusing on is Dames. Follow Dick Biggins P.I. and his trusted assistant “Bouncy” on a look into a world of murder and mystery. Coming in late 2011 As ever expect great art. Eric White won our Twitter competition and produced a very limited promo card for this set which will be available soon.

Rocket Girls

This will be one of our most limited and sought after products. Hand panted canvases, one with every factory set. Pin ups from the best artists in cards. Date TBC

More news to come soon, we are quite advanced in talks on a very very cool license, and I hope to bring more information on this as soon as I can. Needless to say it would be our biggest set to date.

Industry News:

Cryptozoic have entered the non-sport market. They have been in gaming cards for a year now, when they obtained the World Of Warcraft license from Blizzard who stripped it from Upper Deck. (we covered this last year) They are getting a lot of coverage from NSU, and they have a great line-up of licenses including Walking Dead (definitely) and The Big Bang Theory (rumored) to name two. Everything so far indicates that this company is going to do good things, they are bringing a lot of new fans into the non-sport field. They also interact with the fans to a much greater extent than any other company I have seen. Good news if you live outside the USA they also have worldwide rights and WANT to export cards to other markets. Any help we can give these guys we absolutely will. Check them out and have a look at the NSU forums for more information on the new sets.

SketchLife Magazine:


This new card sized magazine is a lot of fun. Produced by Jack Redd, and aided by a host of talented illustrators and creators he has brought something new and innovative to the market. Issue Zero (available now) comes in two formats, standard and Deluxe, the deluxe issue comes with a mini sketch book and a promo for Jacks new Dark Zodiac set which is coming out shortly. (We will have more info on that set soon) You also have the chance to pull a sketch card from some top name artists, along with the chance to obtain a variant sketch cover to the sketch books!

This is a bargain and really deserves as much support as possible, so check it out on the ReddLife Entertanment site!

Bettie Page

This looks like it’s going to be a fantastic set, and Versicolor have brought out some wonderful promos already. Grab a copy of NSU for another one and check out the Versicolor for more info on the set!

Upper Deck:

News Flash Upper Deck pull another dick move and screw independent card dealers. In other news sun still sets, and water is wet.

UD have overhauled there distribution policy (Read: they screwed a bunch of folks) They are artificially propping up the card shops by refusing to sell to anyone without a bricks and mortar store, so if your a show dealer or internet retailer Upper Deck want nothing to do with you. I predict this will fail, I can’t see it lasting. Can you imagine RandomHouse refusing to sell books to Amazon because they don’t have a shop? It’s the same thing, moves like this really show what a small industry we truly are. It’s another case of a manufacturer trying to control products before and AFTER they are sold. This is not free market economics folks it’s market manipulation, but thats nothing new from the company renowned for counterfeiting and lawsuits.

This is talked about again on the NSU forum and over at TraderCracks (which at the time of writing this is offline)

NSU: Lots of good stuff in the new magazine, I found Alan’s Editorial about Dr Who and licensing of particular interest, and I wanted to come in and talk a little about that myself. I’m going to try and be uncharacteristically diplomatic so…. read between the lines…

I have had some experience with this, I had a conversation with Richard Hollis who is the head of BBC Licensing some time ago, and I can tell you now I found the man is extremely difficult to deal with. The interaction I have had with him was very very negative. We approached him about a number of subjects, one of which was the Dr Who license which at the time had lapsed from Strictly Ink, (In fact the last set, Dr Who Trilogy, was released outside of the license terms according to Hollis) and a new part works magazine tie in card set was being produced called “Battles in Time”

This was a “gaming” card printed on very very low quality card stock at a high price. While is was meant to be a game it had no coherent rule structure and people overwhelmingly collected it as a card set.

We talked about the quality problems and the difference between hobby product and a retail product. Hollis dismissed this out of hand, along with the idea that a Classic Who set could be popular now that new Who was out. There would be no other cards released while BiT were being marketed, and he saw no reason to involve any other companies.

Well years later BiT finally folded and Panini took a shot at Who, they produced a gorgeous set of cards which retailed at ¼ of the price per pack on a much higher quality stock than the BiT cards, though again it was meant to be a “game”. One set and then the BBC took the license back “in house” that means a return to a poor card stock and a massive jump in price (see top gear turbo). Expect these cards to flood the market shortly. The lack of understanding and the total lack of interest seems typical of the industry they work in. Lets be honest BBC licensing have authorized some godawful crap in recent years, not to mention the threatened lawsuit against a woman’s knitting pattern, and yet they seem unable to bring a half decent card set to an international market which would snap it up. It’s not just the US fans missing out, the UK fans have had to put up with substandard “gaming” cards for more than half a decade, and there are no signs of any change. A lot of this stems from the BBC wishing to “double monetize” products, they want to sell the rights in the USA to a different company and keep the rights in the UK thus two products and no cross sales. This is never going to work, no US card company is going to take the risk of a USA only Who set, and no card company in the UK seems able to bring a set to market.

We have attempted to contact the licensing department after our initial conversation with Richard, the truth is we were very interested in a limited edition Blackadder trading card set, but after vast numbers of unreturned emails we just gave up. the BBC are not interested, and if they were they will make it damn near imposable to work with them.

With so many properties available I think the BBC is to be avoided at all costs. The cards they do produce and license are generally of a low quality and with a high price tag. This will, in my view, create both a poor first and lasting negative long-term impression of the card industry with consumers, and parents. They will be put off collecting cards as a whole because of this poor first experience with the BBC brands. I wish RH all the best with the upcoming Merlin card set, and I hope that this proves to be the exception to the BBC licensing issues. UK licensing companies and employees just seem to have such a limited grasp of the world outside, while still feeling an unwarranted amount of self worth.

It’s Wrong and yet…

This ebay listing was tweeted about by Robert Hack. All cards should be displayed for sale in this way.

Ok folks it’s been a long wait for the set but Monsters Zombies and Freaks is in it’s final stages. It is with the printers, the chase cards will be the first items back and as soon as we have them photos will be posted. Some of you will know that this product is behind schedule, a lot of things conspired against us on this set, including printing problems, computer crashes and some unfortunate artist drop outs. Thankfully some very talented folks stepped up to fill in a lot of the gaps. This set has some amazing talent involved. The computer problems have been something else, we lost almost all our data including card images, text layouts and well everything. Thankfully a lot of the important parts were recovered from back up, but much was just gone, and we moved to a system that really isn’t cut out for the graphically intensive stuff we do, but it at least it works even if it’s slow. The printing proof of the packaging looks fantastic, and the sketch art is amazing, so even with the problems this set is more than worth the wait!

We then had what I can only describe as a major printing problem, and one which has effectively doubled the production cost of the set, the good news is that cost is not being passed on and the price remains the same. All our pre-order customer who have been waiting on this set will be getting a little something extra from us as a thank you for your patience. The set has sold about 50% of it’s allocation and we really have not chased the pre-orders, with the production problems looming, but now that they are resolved we are going to start pushing the set hard so spread the word and order here!

The images above shows a mix of basic and some of the mini chase cards, you will also find parallel enhanced cards numbered cards, autographs, and an amazing canvas puzzle set which is a lot of fun! Mixed in randomly are redemption’s for items to large to pack insert, including uncut canvas chase sheets, and our new “ultimate gore” (Images coming soon) cards, each is hand made and very very limited.

The set includes sketch cards from:

Bill Pulkovski,
Pablo Diaz,
Carolyn Edwards,
Robert Hack,
Bruce Gerlach,
Jayson Kretzer,
Beck Kramer,
Ted Dastick,
Dane Alt,
Jon Riggle,
Mark Slater,
Kristin Allen,
Lance Sawyer,
Lee Lightfoot,
Rhys McDonald,
Clay McCormack,
Gerald de Dios
and more!

You can see a ton of the completed sketch cards in the gallery and more are uploaded all the time!

On top of this March will see the release of our first factory set entitled Dixon’s Vixens, this features the stunning pin up art art of Matt Dixon. More details about this set will be online soon, but for now you should know it’s low priced and very limited and as ever extremely high quality! We are also aiming to have Age Of Sorcery out in April, and more details will be popping up soon!

This is a short update, and you can expect a much longer one soon! We have posted more than 100 new images of sketch cards for our products on our Gallery page. The page is indexed by set and then artist within the sets so check those out. A bunch of new information just went up on our facebook page as well so for those of you who don’t know already you can find us at www.facebook.com/CultStuff More detailed information will appear on this site soon.

Welcome to 2011! This year will bring a new range of products from Cult-Stuff, many of which we will be detailing in the coming weeks. Now however I want to talk about a set I am really looking forward to and one that we are having a LOT of fun with. That would be  “MZF”. As so many of you will already know our second set Monsters Zombies and Freaks,  is due for release immanently, and as ever a crazy amount of work is going on to make sure it is just right.

First scheduled for release at the end of January, it’s looking more like the first weeks of February. This will allow us to insert more autograph cards and even cooler chase cards. (we have some very amazing stuff coming out for this set) Including die cut variants and numbered autographs. You can see a lot of the sketch cards now on THIS part of the site. Up till now we have not opened any presales to the general public, we will be doing that on  the 13th  of January, but only a very limited number of packs will be available directly from the site.  As ever we offer free shipping world wide! Check the product page for all the details!

Sherlock Holmes and Victorian Crime waive two is late, but moving quickly! It should ship by the end of this month. Teething troubles are all I can say, and a very steep learning curve on our first set.  It really will be worth the wait!  Keep an eye out for more updates! Oh and go and buy the new issue of Non-Sport Update  which should be out now!

We are pleased to announce the first wave of Sherlock Holmes and Victorian Crime is now shipping, along with the new Propaganda Poster Preview sets. Anyone who has ordered these products will be getting a parcel very soon. We still have a limited number of Sherlock Packs left, and we are adding a large number of scans to the card database which can be accessed via this LINK This is not the complete list yet, we are still adding artists and images but it is representative of the quality of work.

It’s that time of year again and we are finaly set for the Memorabilia show. I am pleased to announce that we will be bringing even more exciting products and promos to this show. As you may have seen in our previous announcement we will be supporting the NSU with special limited promotional cards. I am pleased to announce we will have even more to bring with us, included two new promo cards, Monsters Zombies and Freaks P2, and our first War of the Worlds P1 promo card. Both of these are limited to 500. We will also be bringing a small number of our new Military Propaganda Poster Preview sets, more information about this set can be found here

It will also be the first time we have the Sherlock Holmes and Victorian Crime packs available (in limited quantity’s) and we intend to give away packs of new promos and even some uncut sheets and sketch cards over the weekend. For those unable to attend the show fear not, we are keeping a limited stock of promos to one side.