Lets take a look at my all time favorite Star Trek trading card series, the Skybox Star Trek Master Series featuring original art compositions from some of the genre's top illustrators.
These cards were released back in 1993, and to this date I don't think we've gotten another trading card series with art as beautiful as these. I used to try and buy 2 or 3 packages of these every time I went to my local comic book shop back in the day.
Some of the artists whose work is included in this set had been illustrating Star Trek posters and novel covers for many years and they truly know how to capture the essence of our favorite characters, aliens, and ships. Artists like Sonia Hilios, Keith Birdsong, and even Trek production illustrator and FX guru Dan Curry all contributed paintings for this set. These are just beautiful to look at. There is so much detail in each image that you could just stare at them for hours.
Usually one has to spend a lot of money buying limited edition prints or lithos to get this level of quality in Star Trek art, but this set was the perfect way of bringing high end Star Trek art to every fan. Skybox did an amazing job at putting these together. During the many years they had the Star Trek license they put out some amazing card sets, much better in my opinion than what Rittenhouse Archives puts out these days.
SkyBox International Inc. was a trading card manufacturing company founded back in 1989 as Impel Marketing, the company became SkyBox not long after. In 1991 they picked up the license to produce Star Trek trading cards. Skybox, which was later bought by Fleer, continued to produce Star Trek card sets until the year 2000, when their license expired.
Since these cards were produced back in 1993 the set only features art from the first 6 motion pictures and The Original Series, The Next Generation, and DS9. There was a second series produced the following year, I'll share my thoughts on that one as well as my favorite images in a future post. It would be great to see a new series of art cards in the same style released today so it could include art from all the Star Trek shows and films produced since these Skybox sets were released. Now lets take a look at a couple more of my favorite images from the Star Trek Master Series 1.
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