DC SKYCAP #28 FROM 1993

You already know what 1993 represented to superhero comics industry. Everything that looked like a collectible was selling and many publishers made a lot of money from people looking for whatever that smelled to investment for the future.

That year, Skybox, a company which had acquired the rights to produce trading cards based on DC Comics properties, took advantage of the growing wave of people looking for whatever claiming to be a collector's item and dabbled into this so basic market thus the DC Skycaps were born. What were they? Just tokens to play the Milk Caps or POG game, very popular by the early and mid 90's.

The origin of the name for these collectible playing tokens is associated to a certain brand of beverages called Passion Orange Guava or POG by its initials, kids started playing with POG bottle caps before the commercialization of the game, however the milk caps game history can be traced to the 1920's possibly in Hawaii or even earlier, considering there is Japanese game called Memko believed in existence since the 17th century which is pretty similar to POG.

If you were a child by the 90's, there is a big chance you had played this game or seen kids around you playing it. Skybox, probably with the consent and complicity of DC Comics put the hands in this so basic market and produced a 54-cap set plus six foil stamped bonus "chase" skycaps, using the distribution model of the trading cards; that is, you had to buy 6-cap packs with random caps inside, so imagine the problem to assemble a complete set and add to this trying to get all six foil stamped ones.

Like almost all collectibles from those years, they were overproduced and today they are worth not even the price people paid when they were released, provided they looked for a complete set which implies they had to buy several packs. If you have a sealed pack you could collect between 4-6 dollars a piece and if you are lucky enough or seek after hard enough you probably can fin a complete set (minus the foil stamped ones) in the $10-15 range. That does not look like an investment, considering they were released about 23 years ago.

Metamorpho's cap was number 28 and like all other caps from this set, the art is recycled from previous published works, Metamorpho's art is the same from his card in the 1992 DC Cosmic trading card set. Evidently this product was created in a rush just to make money fishing in troubled waters.