‘Trading Cards’ return on Friday with new wave of cardboard icons

The Trading Cards are back — and this time they are in packs.

Long-time readers of The Buzz probably remember California-based illustrator Cuyler Smith whose Trading Cards bring the stars of the reel world (memorable sports movies) to real life using nods to memorable sports card designs from the past.

He’s back with a new show — and a new wave of cardboard — arriving on Friday.

There aren’t a lot of details on this one so far other than there are 40 new pieces to come — and The Big Lebowski‘s Jesus Quintana is one of them. (Three other images, which were released as teasers without direct notation as being part of the series can be seen in the gallery below and we’ll update it once all images are available.)

While these card-size prints were sold as singles in top-loaders and as framed displays limited to just 80 copies per card last time, this time around they also come in five-card packs. They’ll still be signed and numbered inside those packs, too, according to the wrappers.

We’ll update this post with more details once we have them, but the first glimpses at the work will come on Friday night at Gallery 1988, an art gallery in Los Angeles, that’s hosting an opening reception for a show displaying all of the works that runs into March. (Info on that can be seen in the gallery below.)

Did you miss the first release? Roughly a dozen past Trading Cards’ Artist Proofs can be had on the artist’s website, which you can find here.

Update: Several new images are in the gallery. Meanwhile, according to Smith, packs also will include one card — Air Bud — that is a rarer print run only found in packs or an Artist Proof card from the previous series.

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