1995 Skybox DC Power Chrome Legends '95 #53: Despero

I've intended to do posts on this card set in the past (most memorably during the long abandoned Bloodwynd coverage,) but by its very nature, it defies scanning and flash photography. Those of us who lived through the '90s should well remember "chromium," the fad in which art was transposed onto flexible silver foil, rendering the entire image shiny like an old American muscle bumper. The benefit was that it was a much more impressive and durable effect than the more limited and already passé regular foil covers (now commonly employed on toothpaste and some cereal boxes.) The down side was that the "chromium" was very light sensitive, so that from the wrong angle a cover could turn completely black, and you could almost never correctly light the whole surface without glare/fade. Also, chrome cards like these were chemically unstable, so that when placed in a binder page a tacky, foggy residue develops. It's pretty gross, actually.



Further on, card companies were keen to charge more for less in these post boom years. As I recall, the chromium came with an inflated price per pack in the neighborhood of a 50%+ mark-up over standard cards, although that was a lot more value than those stupid Marvel sets that charged a whopping premium for thicker cardboard. Also, as became increasingly common, these cards merely recycled previously published comic art, so you were basically being asked to pony up to get random panels juiced up like premium covers. This piece was taken from an issue of Justice League Task Force drawn by Sal Velluto