Box Break: Fantastic Four Archives

I’ve read comic books for most of my life and for all of those years, I’ve been a fan of the Fantastic Four.  I’ve had my eye on a box of Rittenhouse’s Fantastic Four Archives for a while now and BlowoutCards’ Black Friday sale presented the perfect opportunity to pick up a box.

This was the first time that I had opened a box of any Rittenhouse product.  The cards are nice.  They’re printed on a sturdy stock and have a nice gloss to them.  The colors are bright and pop off of the cards.  The front of the cards have an image from an issue of Fantastic Four.  The backs of the cards display the cover from that issue along with a short summary of the events that unfolded in that issue.

My box contained a complete set which is always a good thing when it comes to non-sport sets due to the fact that singles can be tough to find.  Even in this day and age with singles readily available on the Internet, non-sports singles can still be a challenge to track down.

Nemesis cards depict some of the Fantastic Four’s biggest foes.  The stated odds for these cards are 1:8 packs and that held true in my box.  I pulled Red Ghost, Super-Skrull and Dr. Doom.  When it comes to the Fantastic Four’s foes, there’s none bigger than Dr. Doom.

The next insert set is titled Ready For Action.  These are inserted into every 12 packs.  From the two that I received, it looks like this insert set consists of images of the Fantastic Four ready to head into battle.  These cards are printed on foil board that is only exposed in certain areas such as the Human Torch’s flame and the 4 logos on the heroes’ uniforms.  This printing process gives the card a unique look that you can’t really see in the scan.

The next insert set also uses foil board in the printing process.  The Legendary Heroes come one per box and there are nine different cards.  Since the Fantastic Four only consists of four members, they decided to include some of the other superheroes who have filled in as a member of the team including Crystal, Medusa, Power Man, She-Hulk and Black Panther.  I understand why they did this, but when I’m buying a box of Fantastic Four, I want cards to be of the four main members of the team.  Luckily, I was able to pull one of the charter members in Sue Storm, The Invisible Woman.

The main reason that people open these boxes are for the other one-per-box insert.  Sketch cards have gotten very popular within the hobby to the point that they’ve been included in various sports sets by Topps.  While I lucked out with my Legendary Heroes card, I wasn’t as lucky with my sketch card.

Like a lot of people, I’m hoping that these boxes will yield a Katie Cook sketch card.  My wife introduced me to her art and I’ve been following her work online for a few years now.  She’s become extremely popular with sketch card collectors and her cards go for huge amounts of money.  Pulling one out of a box is probably the only way that I’m going to end up owning one.  I didn’t pull a Katie Cook sketch, but what I did pull is a beautiful sketch card of Storm done by Dennis Crisostomo, but I’m not a huge fan of either Storm or the X-Men.  Yes, Storm has spent time as a member of the Fantastic Four, but if I wanted a Storm sketch card I would be opening boxes of X-Men Archives.  So, this card is destined to make its way to eBay.  Luckily, it looks like Crisostomo is a popular artist and right fully so because it looks like he’s done a lot of beautiful sketch cards.  If this was of the Human Torch, Thing or the whole team it would be a great part of my collection, but now it may end up paying for my box.

I was very happy with my first Rittenhouse product.  The quality and collation were great.  I would give this product an A and my box in particular a B due to the fact that my sketch card wasn’t one of the main members of the Fantastic Four.

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