Palatinus' OverPower Forum

I was going to post some DC3 card art in the art thread but then I decided to write a few words about DC3. Then it got to be more than a few words. Then I found a lot more art. So I thought this was worthy of a new thread.

DC3, as most of you probably know, was the name for the third DC set that was never released. This set was not killed with the demise of OverPower in 1999 but died earlier during OverPower's transition from Fleer to Marvel (at the end of 1997 or start of 1998).

I don't know who pulled the plug - DC or Marvel, but it was revealed at the time that the art for DC3 had been commissioned and paid for at the time of JLA. This made JLA look much worse financially than it really was and so made further DC sets less attractive. This sounds more like an excuse than the real reason. After all, they surely knew how much the art cost and subtraction isn't the hardest mathematical operation. Maybe it had more to do with the way DC operated (see below) and their unwillingness to work with Marvel in this way. Or, to be fair, Marvel's unwillingness to let DC work this way. Or both.

DC had exerted considerable editorial control over the previous DC sets. I believe that DC determined, or at least strongly influenced, the character stats and specials. I believe they were aiming for accuracy and consistency within the DC universe and were not concerned with making the sets comparable to, or competitive with, Marvel. Even when Fleer was producing OverPower I don't think Marvel had this same level of hands on involvement with the stats although Marvel did have editorial input over which characters they wanted to see included and promoted.

Anyway, what do we know about DC3?

Mostly people refer to the set as DC3 but the actual name seems to be Universal Forces. It says this on Wikipedia so it must be true. Also, at least one of the artists wrote this on the cards. With the addition of locations to the DC OverPower universe and lots of team based cards this set seems in some ways to be the DC 'Monumental' with the caveat that I have no indication that power cards or starter decks were planned for DC3.

Nick still has a checklist of known cards here:
http://justabgkid.com/ripayuheadoffs/op/dc3.html

This list comes from the art - most of which is quite well labeled like most of the DC art I have seen. I have some updates to add to this list so when I get my act fully together I'll produce an updated list but Nick has most of it. In total I think I have images of the art from about 110 different cards - probably around half the set although most of these are just images,  I don't own more than a few of pieces of the actual art. I also have some preliminary sketches that are not well labeled that we can only guess at titles for.

Although most of the character specials have names I have never seen, or even heard of, a list that assigned stats to the characters or actions to the specials. I'm pretty sure one doesn't exist. Although that doesn't mean that whoever came up with the list and assigned the art (Ron?) didn't already have some ideas in mind.

Here's a rundown of the set by card type.

Teamworks

I need to dig these out. I think I have at least three and they need adding to the list. I already posted one on the art list. DC had some way to go before having a complete set of possible teamworks.

Locations

Suicide Slum by Jackson Guice. Nick has ten on the list and those are the only ones I know of.

Ally cards

Vandal Savage by Jason Armstrong and Drew Geraci

Doubleshot cards
I already posted these on the art thread:
http://www.beenhereandthere.com/SMF/index.php?topic=281.msg2540#msg2540
and
http://www.beenhereandthere.com/SMF/index.php?topic=281.msg3195#msg3195
I have (had) ten of these and some of these need adding to Nick's list.

Any hero cards (actually any character cards)
Oops, forgot to get images of any of these. There's a nice Any Character with Warlord by Mike Grell that isn't on Nick's list.

New specials for old characters


New Characters

Lots of teams (eg Rogues Gallery and Justice Society shown below) but also some individuals (eg Deathstroke and Lobo - also shown below)






Okay that's enough for now. Specials to follow if you want:

There was actually an auction on eBay a few years back for a large number of DC3 artwork. I didn't know what price it ended at and I didn't really feel the need to buy them up.

Quote from: Jack on July 22, 2011, 09:28:38 PM
There was actually an auction on eBay a few years back for a large number of DC3 artwork. I didn't know what price it ended at and I didn't really feel the need to buy them up.

I don't suppose you saved the images (bit of a longshot!), or remember any of the details?

Hardly, I can only remember the auction happening; but that's just about it. I think they went cheap too; maybe $50 or so.

Jack, I think the auction you were talking about were COPIES of the original artwork for DC3. The Twinz (if you remember them from back when the game was alive) were selling them i think. Quite a bargain, i think it ended closer to 25. Marvel sent out copies of the DC3 original artwork to people who helped work on the game (probably why JohnL has a set). But I don't believe any of the actual ORIGINAL art ever surfaced. I might be wrong.. Correct me if i am.

You're probably right, it's been too long and I didn't pay attention to any fine details about it.

Quote from: drdeath25 on July 24, 2011, 10:33:24 PM
Jack, I think the auction you were talking about were COPIES of the original artwork for DC3. The Twinz (if you remember them from back when the game was alive) were selling them i think. Quite a bargain, i think it ended closer to 25. Marvel sent out copies of the DC3 original artwork to people who helped work on the game (probably why JohnL has a set). But I don't believe any of the actual ORIGINAL art ever surfaced. I might be wrong.. Correct me if i am.

Ah, I wondered if this might be the case. A bit naughty if they were selling copies of their copies. Slightly less naughty if they were just auctioning off their set!

I don't think Marvel sent these out but Norm had a set he copied for a few people. It wasn't the complete set of commissioned art because quite a few pieces have turned up for sale since then that were not in the stack (eg the teamworks and doubleshots).

Because all the DC art was done to a high standard and was fully inked and finished, often with nice backgrounds, by 'name' artists, even unreleased art like DC3 would be attractive to art collectors and likely to fetch at least as much as a commissioned inked character sketch. I'd guess starting at $40-$50 and going up for bigger names and more popular characters. But it's a long time since I bought art so I may be way out of touch.

While I'm here let's see some of those specials. First up the Rogue's Gallery (character card above). Don't ask me why there are 8 specials. Several of the DC3 characters have a decent stack of specials - were these all to be included in the DC3 set or were some to be saved for future sets?

I thought I had seen all of the DC3 stuff that was out there, but that Deathstroke hero card is new to me (and I like it). He would have to have been the 8 fighting of the set? Anyway, archiving stuff like this is cool.

Quote from: JohnL on July 22, 2011, 07:28:45 PM
DC had exerted considerable editorial control over the previous DC sets. I believe that DC determined, or at least strongly influenced, the character stats and specials. I believe they were aiming for accuracy and consistency within the DC universe and were not concerned with making the sets comparable to, or competitive with, Marvel. Even when Fleer was producing OverPower I don't think Marvel had this same level of hands on involvement with the stats although Marvel did have editorial input over which characters they wanted to see included and promoted.

There is a hilarious newsgroup post where the process of DC's interaction is outlined. From what I remember when I was digging through old stuff last year, DC had a single liason to Ron/Marvel, and he had final say on pretty much everything. He seemed adamant about DC cards only being played against other DC characters, which I guess explains the ridiculous level 4 AR attacks. I'll have to try to re-discover those posts, because I think there was a subtext of fanboyism with whoever that one liason guy was. The post has his name too, and obviously he was more of a comics guy than a game design guy.

Quote from: Onslaught on July 25, 2011, 03:52:38 AM
I thought I had seen all of the DC3 stuff that was out there, but that Deathstroke hero card is new to me (and I like it). He would have to have been the 8 fighting of the set? Anyway, archiving stuff like this is cool.

The Deathstroke specials look pretty nice too. I just realized that all the TEAM characters in DC3 we know about (Hyperclan, Legion of Superheroes, Rogues Gallery) got 8 specials and the SINGLE characters (Black Lightning, Deathstroke, Fate, Impulse, Lobo, Mordru) got 6 specials. Except Justice Society where we only have 5 but, unusually, these are all by different artists so maybe a few are missing.

I like the idea of giving team's more specials to choose from than single characters.

Whoever commissioned the DC art must have been really demanding, because pretty much every piece of art is so sharp.

Quote from: Onslaught on July 26, 2011, 01:54:49 AM
Whoever commissioned the DC art must have been really demanding, because pretty much every piece of art is so sharp.

I totally agree. The consistently high quality on the DC art is really nice. Even the prelims are works of art:


On the other hand the inconsistent quality of the marvel art is also kind of fun because you can find that a card you've never looked at twice is just an awesome piece of art. I'll post an image sometime but I have the Dr Strange/Wong ally card art and it's on a full 11 x 17 board and is just beautiful. And huge. It's barely noticeable on the actual card but Dr Strange is levitating behind Wong which is much more noticeable on the actual art.

Awesome. Simply Awesome. I had no idea that art had even been commissioned for DC3 so this was a pretty sweet post to come across this morning.