It might shock you to learn this. But I was, at one time, the owner of a complete set of X-Men Series II trading cards.
It’s true.
I also collected baseball cards, because like any self-respecting tomboy I played baseball, not softball. Softball is for chicks.
But Series II was my most favorite set of any kind of cards I ever collected. (I know this sentence isn’t grammatically correct and yet I choose to type it that way anyway. Deal with it). The Fleer Ultra series was OK, but it just didn’t have quite the same magic to it.
The tall, narrow type on top. The dramatic action shot below. The statistical data on the back. They were pure perfection. I even had the cards from the cartoon series with the film strip border. They were great as reference material or for just sitting down and reading.
And then one day my brother stole them.
He also collected baseball and X-Men cards. It was something we did together as loving siblings. We would walk up Country Club Lane to the comic book store and buy them and trade them. We also went through a pog phase but try not to hold that against us. I kept my cards in the same navy blue binder in nice segmented card protector pages on a shelf in my bedroom. They never deviated from that spot and I never took them outside. At some point my brother lost a few. I remember thinking, damn, that sucks for him, at least I still have all of mine.
The next time I pulled my binder out, the ones he happened to be missing were now missing from my binder.
WTF.
I took mine back.
He stole them again.
Little shit.
This went back and forth for years until he finally hid them where I couldn’t find them. My brother, my own flesh and blood, saw fit to steal and hide my own X-Men cards from me and had the gall to claim that I had stolen them from him. As if. This is the kid who opened up his Superman death comic when he was explicitly told not to and the kid next door had a perfectly good opened one he could have read instead. And he accused ME, who won’t even open the Star Trek Christmas ornament box? Psssh.
I never did find my X-Men cards after that.
So I stole his star ships.
Three beautiful Enterprise models, the Enterprise NCC-1701, NC-1701 refit and Enterprise NCC-1701-D. All beautifully hand painted by our Dad.
What? He didn’t appreciate them anyway.