I have a dozen obscure searches saved on my eBay app. If one of them sends me a push notification, it means something rare just got listed. I’ve had one search saved for years without ever getting pinged. I was convinced the item didn’t exist, and it was just an urban legend. Then a seller listed not one, but SEVEN of the elusive Mark Voger sketch cards. (For some background context of what these are: read this blog post).
The Defective Comics sketch cards by Active Marketing are arguably the oldest and first sketch cards. In fact, when you check the signed dates and printed indicia, it appears Groo was 1995, Bone was 1994, and both Simpsons and Defective Comics are dated 1993.
I hadn’t seen a single Defective Comics sketch card ever listed on eBay (and I’ve been active since 1998), but of course I can’t see everything. In fact, the first four Defective Comics sketch cards sold BIN for $50 each in January 2023 and got snatched up before I could claim one.
Then in February 2023, the seller decided to list three more Defective Comics sketch cards at auction (instead of BIN). — I was watching and bidding, but they eventually moved out of my budget.
I don’t think there’s any conspiracy that the seller has the whole quantity of 500 in their possession because the seller is also selling sealed boxes of the product. I also noticed that the numbering of the sketch cards isn’t sequential (the listed cards are #16, #136, #364, etc.) — I simply think that these sketch cards have been in storage for decades, and are only now surfacing after 29 years.
That’s one more trading card Urban Legend solved. Now I need to reconfigure my eBay saved searches and be even faster on the trigger in case another batch gets listed. Good luck, y’all.
Original Art that fits in your pocket 