Trading Card- Related News

• Through the Wormhole Cards

• Season Four Trading Cards

• Uncut Costume Card Sheet

• Season Three Trading Cards

• Season Two Trading Cards

• Farscape in Motion Trading Cards

• Farscape in Motion Preview Set

• 2002 Calendar

• Ships of Farscape

• SciFi Channel Special Edition

• Season One Trading Cards

• Postcards

Season Three Trading Cards  

When I first saw the specs for this set, I thought it would be a great addition to my Farscape trading card collection, but very easy to complete. Man, was I wrong. For those of us who NEED every single card in a collection, Series Three could be the most difficult one yet.

There's excellent collation in the set. Except for one freaky box that had several packs with 4 or 5 of the same card and no SketchaFEX card, most of the boxes broke down exactly as promised. Here's the breakdown on the first box I opened: 

• Three complete base sets and three cards short of a fourth

• Eight Behind the Scenes, no duplicates

• Eight The Quotable Farscape, no duplicates

• Two Revenging Angel Cels (R3 & R18)

• Two Family Ties (F4 & F5)

• Paul Goddard autograph (A13)

• SketchaFEX card Brainiac Crichton by Kubert School artist Chris Prievo

For a rundown of the cards, let's start with the easy to find cards.

The base set continues where the Season Two set left off, with card #145, and has three cards per episode, three cast montage cards and three checklist cards for a total of 72 cards. The format is the same as the first two sets with a picture on the front and a different picture on the back that's usually a close up of one of the characters in the episode. Also on the back is a paragraph about the story line and a Farscape Files section that gives credits or a small piece of information about the episode.

Some of the pictures are a bit dark, but some of Season Three was a bit dark, too. Rittenhouse has chosen a wide variety of images including CGI shots, action shots and character pictures.  

The Quotable Farscape and Behind the Scenes sets are 22 cards each, one per episode. As with the base cards, they start where the previous set left off, with #23. It's hard to see in the pictures at the left, but the card titles are done in foil, blue for the Quotables and silver for the Behind the Scenes. Each of these sets is inserted at the rate of one in every five packs so they're fairly easy to find and complete the 22 card set. 

Both set have an episode picture on the front but differ on the back. The Quotable Farscape has a quote from the episode. For example Q31, Losing Time, says, "We don't understand the R2D2 crap. We're going ot use the Star Trek System - one blink for yes, two blinks for no." The Behind the Scenes set has quite a bit of information on each episode written by David Kemper. Some of them are about development of the story, others about events that occurred while filming.

Family Ties is a six card set inserted at the rate of one in every 20 packs, or about two per box. Represented are Crichton, Aeryn, Chiana, Moya, D'Argo and Crais. There's a picture of the character in the frame on the front with images of family members to the right. The backs of the cards give a bit of family history. Moya's little family includes not only Talyn, but Pilot and the DRDs. Since Crais doesn't have a large family (at least not one we know of) there's a picture of his brother Tauvo and another picture of the charred remains of his brother Tauvo. Crichton's family includes his mom, his dad, his wife (Princess Katralla) and their unborn child.

Revenging Angel Animation Cels are also inserted at the rate of one in 20 packs, but there are 18 of these which makes them a bit more difficult to find. They're also fantastic! If you hold them up to the light, the backgrounds are transparent, only the characters themselves are opaque. They're made of some kind of hard plastic or celluloid material so they're pretty rigid and don't bend or crack easily.

The first three, R1-R3, are images of Crichton; R4-R6 are of D'Argo; R7-R9 are of Crichton and D'Argo together; R10 is Scorpius; R11 is Aeryn; R12-R18 are images of Crichton with the various incarnations of Cartoon Aeryn. 

Autograph Cards are found at the rate of one in every 40 packs (one per box.) They seem pretty well distributed with none of them being more rare than the others. Autographs include Paul Goddard as Stark, Tammy MacIntosh as Jool, Matt Newton as Jothee, Linda Cropper as Xhalax Sun, Magda Szubanski as Furlow, Evan Sheaves as young Scorpius, Francesca Buller as Raxil and Producer/Director Andrew Prowse. 

There is also a binder-exclusive Rygel autograph card signed by Jonathan Hardy, the voice of Rygel. The case topper for this set is "Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan, In Memorium" that was autographed by Virginia Hey. It comes in a plastic case with the opening protected by a gold foil Rittenhouse Archives seal and is found at the rate of one per case, or one in 480 packs.

All of the autographs except the case topper are the same layout as previous seasons' autographs.

Costume Cards: Originally there weren't going to be any costume  cards in this set but when the set was announced there was so much crabbing and moaning by collectors (myself included) that Steve Charendoff, the president of Rittenhouse Archives, graciously decided to include two of them. They used Xhalax Sun's burgundy-colored suede costume for one and they cut up the Mambo shirt that Harvey wore in Crackers Don't Matter and A Dog with Two Bones. This second one is a fantastic costume to use because every card is different. I found the one with the Mambo logo on it, but most of them are multi-colored bits from the shirt design. There are one of each costume card in each case, or one per 240 packs.

SketchaFEX Cards are completely new to the Farscape collection. There are 18 character cards. Several different artists were assigned about four characters each and they sketched multiples of this character until their fingers fell off. Well, maybe not, but there are a lot of cards out there done by very few artists. 

The first 13 are fairly easy to find except for one, the Scorpius card drawn by artist John Czop. There are only 200 of these floating around so if you pull one from a pack, consider yourself very lucky. The other four that Czop sketched have 500 each. There are four sketches by Warren Martineck with 400 each and four by Pable Raimondi with 600 each.

Now the fun begins. Rittenhouse Archives hired artists from the Kubert School (The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Inc.) to draw the images on the last five cards. Each of these is available in a lower quantity than most of the other cards. In addition, no card number was done by only one artist, and usually there were several who worked on each. On top of that, most of the artists worked on more than one card. From what I've been able to find out, the table below gives the variations for each card. For all I know, each artist worked on each card. 

There isn't a lot of difference among the cards of the same character that were worked on by different artists outside of their signature, but for an obsessed collector like me, it's enough to make me try and find all of them. If anyone knows of any that aren't listed here, please let me know. I might have a few dollars left to begin the search again.

PKBarb

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