Where It All Started

The Birth of Cartoon Cardz the Brand

As a young child growing up in the early 70s, I was first introduced to lovable characters every afternoon watching Sesame Street, where I also learned numbers, letters, and words. Soon I was reading all the time. My favorite books? Any that featured Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the whole Peanuts gang. How did I spend every single Saturday morning? Glued to the TV, watching the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, Super-Friends, Hong Kong Phooey, Scooby-Doo’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics, and countless other cartoons. How did I spend my afternoons after school? Watching the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole, and countless other Hanna-Barbera favorites. Let’s not forget all the time I dreamt of being Spider-Man while watching the reruns of his animated series, first released in 1967. Speaking of reruns, I of course loved the Mickey Mouse show as well as classic Disney movies, both past and present….then came the Muppet Show in 1976 and I was fascinated with them, as my favorite part of watching Sesame Street had been seeing the muppets anyway. 

Cartoons, cuddly characters, and superheroes were not my only fascination though, as I also loved watching sports and my prized collection of baseball cards. Many years later, in 1991, that love for sports cards led me to open my first business in the sports card industry. Now as I enter 35 years as a full-time sports card dealer, I decided to embark upon this new adventure, which allows me to merge my love for trading cards and my lifetime love of classic “characters” from my childhood and even the childhood of my own kids Josh and Allison, as no, SpongeBob was not around in the 70s.

Earlier this year, I told my wife Jane how I wished a website existed where I could learn about the trading card history of these iconic brands, including the first cards of my favorites (in the sports card world, we call them their “rookie” cards). I’ve always been puzzled as to why such an importance has always been placed on the “first appearance” of characters in a comic book, and yet their “first appearance” in a trading card set is so often overlooked. 

In the world we live in where Trading Card Games are the rage and countless other non-sports sets are collected on a global scale, it has become completely acceptable to buy and sell cards that fall outside the realm of sports; therefore, I felt that the time for a site like CartoonCardz.com was way overdue. I decided I wanted a full-blown site loaded with information on the brands I love, the characters I love, and these cards I love. Thus began a process that involved numerous team members led by our web master Jared Hamby, his assistant Austin McElroy, and magazine designer Perri Rabbitt.

My vision was to create a site loaded with images galore… to showcase hundreds of sets where collectors could just come and spend hours enjoying page after page of images from these iconic brands… Disney, Peanuts, Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera, Marvel, DC, The Muppets, and many more. What I thought would be a 1-2 week simple project turned into many months of research and design (and then redesign), chasing countless images, tens of thousands of dollars spent on inventory, and then the dream to create a magazine to give readers a small taste of what the site offers them.

To my collecting friends across the globe, here we are… the launch of CartoonCardz.com.

Thanks for reading!

Cartoon Cardz