COMCars

It should be no surprise to my regular readers that I love car cards and try to get some into every COMC order, and this order was particularly good! 

Starting out with my oldest car card ever, from the 1911 Turkey Red Automobile Series! This was only the second automotive set ever made that I'm aware of and has been on my wantlist for a long time. A 50 card set, I don't harbor any delusions of completing it any time soon but for now I'm happy to have it in my collection. You can see I lowered my usual standards...a card missing chunks of it is one of the things that I usually don't go for, but here I made an exception. When you are dealing with a card that's 111 years old you are more willing to compromise.

Making some progress on the 1953-54 Topps World on Wheels set. The first card shown, #2, is so far the only one I've found which called out a specific driver, this being Freddie Agabashian, as that is the car he drove at the Indy 500 the year previously. My favorite cards here though are the Pierce Great Arrow and the Colmbia. Love the Brass Era stuff. 

Next up we have two cards from the 1963 Topps Sports Cars set. This set surprised me because they are Tall-Boy sized. I wasn't expecting that because I had never seen them in context before. They have always either been compressed images or just random floating in space images, not put next to any other cards. Both of these two cards have some meaning for me. The Firebird III has fascinated me since I was a little kid, it's the car on the Daytona 500 trophy although there it's solid chrome. But, I've actually been interested in this car longer than I've been into NASCAR, since I got a Micro Machines version of it circa 1990. The Chevrolet Corvette SS was a purpose built race car, very famous among sports car racing, and I saw it on display at the Saratoga Automobile Museum around a decade ago. 

Considered by some the first automobile ever made, this is the Cugnot Steam Carriage of the 1770s

1895 Panhard et Levasseur

The biggest progress I made was to the 1968 Brooke Bond History of the Motor Car set. These tobacco sized cards are not particularly hard to find as you can see by how many of them I added, though I was not paying enough attention to card condition when I bought the Lancia card, more concerned with price, and got bit by paper loss on the front. Being a British set it's fairly heavy on the British cars, although it does include other countries like France (Cugnot, Panhard et Levasseur, Le Jamais Contente), Spain (Hispano Suiza), Italy (Lancia), Germany (NSU) and of course the USA (Napier, Oldsmobile, Mercer, Ford). This is a 50 card set and I'm nearly halfway on the set build...I do believe that I may actually complete this one some day. 

 The Topps Automobiles of 1977 set is a strange one. I have had very little luck finding any cards from this set. In fact, this is the first one I've ever been able to add to my collection. My dad was not a card collector but he did get a pack of this set, and three of the cards survive. All three took severe water damage in a basement flood from before the time I can remember, but I treasure them all the same. Being from only 1977 this set shouldn't be so hard to find, I would love to complete it some day but with how little luck I've had over the years I just don't know if I ever will. 

Yes, this is a car card in my mind. Arianny Celeste is one of the hosts of Overhaulin', which is a car show that I watch sometimes. It's not my favorite show as I don't like the majority of the changes they make to the cars, and I hate the pranking they do to get access to the cars, but the way everybody comes together to help the car owner, and the reveals of the car, always gives me good feelings, so I watch...usually only the second half of the episode. She wears a lot more clothes on the car show but card options were limited. 

I somehow missed the 2014 Goodwin Champions set, even though most of the other years have found their way into my collection. Occasionally I will do a random search for car company names- COMC does NOT make it easy to search non-sports cards, definitely not something they care much about- and I discovered these two cards that way. 

Fred and his brother August Duesenberg founded the car company that bears their name, and while it was not in existence for very long, (1921-37) they made the classiest cars ever made in history, in my opinion. Walter P. Chrysler is probably a more familiar name to people who aren't into cars, as the company he founded is still around and still producing cars. The Chrysler Building in New York City...which I have shown here multiple times, one of my favorite buildings in the city...was also constructed by him. He actually got his start in the automobile business at Buick in 1911, coincidentally the same year as the Buick card that led off this post was produced! He also worked at Willys before taking command of Maxwell, which was renamed Chrysler, and founding Plymouth and DeSoto and buying Dodge, to form one of the Big Three automakers with Ford and General Motors. Although the company has undergone trials and tribulations, mergers, takeovers and more, you can still go out and buy a car with the Chrysler name this very day if you so chose. 

It is my first card of all three people who appeared in this post, and now with Walter Chrysler joining my collection the founders of the Big Three are all represented. Henry Ford has many cards, several of which I have and Billy Durant has only one but I have it. Now they are all here in my collection.