A few weeks ago, I was well into a (different) custom deck project when my friend Joey Tufo asked me on Facebook if I had "any interest in making a DC Bombshell fan deck?" Initially I told him that I was caught up in my current project, and that I probably wasn't going to tackle another one any time soon. In truth, I didn't even know what he was talking about, since I'm not really a comic book reader any more. Then I made my big mistake. I started poking around on the Internet to see what he was talking about. Very quickly, I was smitten.
In case you aren't familiar with them, DC Bombshells started out as a series of collectible statues based on designs by Ant Lucia, Basically these were 1940's style pinup art, using a variety of DC heroines and sometime villains, like Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn.
They were so popular that DC started using similar designs as variant cover art for a variety of their regular titles.
And these in turn were so popular that the Bombshells got their own comic book title, initially featuring Mera, Batwoman, Wonder Woman, Supergirl and Cosmic Girl. (The image at the top of this post is of a variant cover for issue #1.) Bombshells is set in an alternative universe, in the midst of World War II. In the world of the Bombshells, there are no masculine superheroes, so while the men of the world are off fighting, it's up to the ladies to keep the world safe from super-villainy, as well as the plain old Nazi villainy. One of the most interesting parts of their story is that Cosmic Girl and Supergirl are both Russian, at least initially. After being told to do the unthinkable, they defect and join forces with Amanda Waller's disparate band of Bombshells.
Anyway, before I knew it, I was completely sucked in by the Bombshells, and my previous project hit the shelf. I fell in love with the Bombshell art, first, and then with their story. But how to turn all that cool art into a deck? I was fresh out of novel ideas at that point, so I decided just to appropriate an existing favorite deck archetype, X-Mental. It seemed like a good fit. Since the two most important cards in that deck are Emma Frost and Jean Grey, it made sense to me to make an all-female-hero deck based on that one.
Since all the Bombshells art has a 1940's feel to it, I wanted a new card template, too, one that captured their 40's spirit. My main inspiration was the Batwoman cover shown above, with the Kate Kane baseball card. I decided to do a special card border that looked like old, yellowed cardboard. After starting with the template I created for my Towers of Asgard deck, I sepia-toned many of the card elements to age them a bit. Then I spent many hours picking new fonts that would give the cards some old-school flavor. To complete the look, I used the same logo that DC Comics used from 1949 to 1970. Here's what the cards look like. (This card is not part of the deck; it's just a regular Vs card made with the template.)
Finally, as with all my custom decks, I created a custom card back that included the DC Bombshells logo.
When I was almost done with my Bombshells deck, I realized that a lot of the cards I'd designed were fairly generic, or could easily be made so, and that it might be fun to turn it into a mini-set with a companion deck based on the villains in the Bombshells comics. In Part 2, I will go into detail about the main Bombshells deck and then in Part 3 I will discuss the villains deck.
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