Like the movie it chronicled, The Empire Strikes Back: The Original Topps Trading Card Series Volume Two ended on a cliffhanger. Instead of the
movie’s lingering questions of parentage, the books’ cliffhanger was “Will Volume Three suffer from the same issues
as Volume Two?” The problem with
Abrams Books’ second volume in its compilations of classic Star Wars trading cards is that it shrank the images down way too
much, reducing its reproductions of Topps’ Empire Strikes Back cards to a size smaller than that of the actual
cards. Pages were overwhelmed with wasted white space while you needed a
magnifying glass to see those images of the most visually arresting Star Wars movie.
Well, the cliffhanger has now been resolved,
and the news is much better than Luke’s discovery that Darth Vader really is
his dad. The images are once again back to the oversized dimensions of those in
Star Wars: The Original Topps
Trading Card Series Volume One. That’s great news because although Return of the Jedi does not have the artful
visual style of its predecessor, it does have the most interesting looking
menagerie of aliens of any Star Wars
picture, and you get to ogle the likes of Jabba the Hutt, Bib Fortuna, the
Gamorrean Guards, Nien Nunb, Admiral Ackbar, Sy Snootles, and the rest in all
their weird glory in Volume Three.
The fact that Return
of the Jedi provided many of the trilogy’s most interesting stills—stills
that are arguably more interesting than the film, itself—helps to mitigate the
fact that the overall presentation is a bit less interesting this time around.
There are none of the outtake, behind-the-scenes, or production art images used
in the Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back series. Gary Gerani,
who wrote the cards’ original captions, seems less enthusiastic this time too,
providing far fewer of his witty and colorful comments than he did in the first
volume. In the plus column for Topps, the image quality is vastly improved for Return of the Jedi (images on Star Wars and Empire cards tended to be extremely grainy and often blurry) and
the card backs feature neat character illustrations. In the plus column for
Abrams is the fact that the pictures are no longer being presented at
microscopic size. It makes one wish for a fourth volume in Abrams’ series
called The Empire Strikes Back: The Non-Tiny Original Topps Trading Cards.
