Review of 'Star Wars : The Empire Strikes Back' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
The first volume covered the cards Topps created for the original Star Wars movie, this volume covers those they made for The Empire Strikes Back.
Like the first volume, and unlike the volume covering the Star Wars Galaxy trading cards, all the cards, front and back, are included. With some cards, mainly the puzzle backed ones, there's no indication which front goes with which back, but that doesn't bother me much.
The book is just as good in quality as the original. There seems to be slightly less text, probably because production of this series went more smoothly than the original, so there are fewer stories to tell. Looking over the cards reproduced in this book it's evident that the work was more consistent and unified than in the earlier Star Wars sets, but I still prefer those earlier cards, which is the main reason for the slightly lower rating …
The first volume covered the cards Topps created for the original Star Wars movie, this volume covers those they made for The Empire Strikes Back.
Like the first volume, and unlike the volume covering the Star Wars Galaxy trading cards, all the cards, front and back, are included. With some cards, mainly the puzzle backed ones, there's no indication which front goes with which back, but that doesn't bother me much.
The book is just as good in quality as the original. There seems to be slightly less text, probably because production of this series went more smoothly than the original, so there are fewer stories to tell. Looking over the cards reproduced in this book it's evident that the work was more consistent and unified than in the earlier Star Wars sets, but I still prefer those earlier cards, which is the main reason for the slightly lower rating I gave.
The other reason for lowering the rating a bit is a result of the text on the back of the second series of cards. The original cards were printed with black ink over a red background, and obviously the editors of the book couldn't change that, but it makes that text extremely difficult to read on the cards that are reproduced in a smaller size (some cards are reproduced with the front and back on the same page, others in a larger format where they are on separate pages, the latter is much easier to read). Some effort could have been taken to minimize this issue.
Overall, this was another nice flashback to my youth, as I did collect a number of cards from the first two series and a few from the third. It was also interesting to see the "Giant Photo Cards" as those were not something I remember ever seeing at the time.