1936 Gum, Inc. G-Men & Heroes of the Law

I've had my COMC stockpile for over two weeks now and still haven't shown a single one of the 398 cards (there was supposed to be 400 -- two were missing -- long story, future post) yet. I have no idea how many of those will ever even make it in to a post, between this group, my recent box purchases, a recent large lot from eBay, and this past weekend's card show, I'm starting to get a bit overwhelmed with cards right now... and not in a good way.

That being said, I knew I wasn't going to not feature today's card, which happens to be my first card from what is still one of the most popular non-sport sets from the 30's:

I used to see cards from this set for sale all the time at my uncle's comic book shows when I was growing up. But that was back in the pre eBay days, which meant crazy high prices were placed upon them, and therefore the much younger me never expected to own any. So it seems kind of amazing that after many years of nary a thought in regards to this set, that I can see this card, which had been newly added to COMC, and pick it up for around $3. Sometimes I'm really glad the internet exists... only sometimes though! If it didn't, I can't even imagine what cards like this would be priced at nowadays.

After some initial searching yielded no positive results, I started to think that perhaps this card's story was slightly less than factual. That was until I came across this article about Hong Yick, who is obviously the ne'er do well featured on this particular card. They changed his name, a few minor details, and the location, but other than that it's clearly a match. I thought it was kind of funny that they changed the location of the crime from Seattle to San Francisco, but I guess due in large part to it's depiction throughout popular culture up until that point, San Francisco's Chinatown would have seemed like the more apt place for such a crime to occur. It seems like they would have changed the place of execution as well, just for the simple fact that someone convicted of murder in California wouldn't have been sent to Washington to be executed. I wonder if the writer screwed up on that one, or if they just didn't think anyone would notice --- either way it's kind of interesting.

With it's skip numbers and color variations, this is not a set that I will likely ever even contemplate undertaking. But I certainly wouldn't mind picking up a few more should the opportunity ever present itself.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.