Monday, January 2, 2017

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.

9 comments:

  1. That's a great card! I had no idea they existed until now. I'll have to go check into them.

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    1. Thanks, I was pretty happy with it! It's always nice to be able to post about a set that at least a few people might not already be familiar with.

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  2. Thanks for posting. The non sports cards are all new to me

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    1. You're welcome, Mark. I have multiple more non-sport posts coming.

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  3. Awesome card. Never seen one of these before. Looks like I need to find one for my Bay Area PC.

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    1. With all the history that area has, that must be one heck of a PC!

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    2. It's still in its infancy stage. But I love this area... and lots of athletes have come from here, so it's only a matter of time.

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  4. The G-Men cards are really cool but the set is a pain in the ass. There are actually a couple of sets from the time period that are extremely similar and could easily be mistaken for one set or another. You are correct, the stories are sometimes real with some facts changed, not sure why, while other cards have stories that are completely made up.

    That is a nice card, the back has held up very well.

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    1. Before doing this post, I was reading a whole bunch of old message board posts on multiple sites full of people lamenting on the difficulties of collecting this set. If they wanted to use true stories for all the cards, one wouldn't think they would have had any trouble coming up with usable material, so it is a bit perplexing as to why there ended up being such a mix of both fact and fiction.

      Other than the scuffing, the front isn't too bad either. I really wanted this particular card not only for the subject matter, but also because the colors really appealed to me.

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