Dallas Artist Chet Phillips's Steampunk Superheroes, The Hot Gift for Cool Kids

I see Paste's blog has given an awful nice shout-out to local artist Chet Phillips, whose military monkeys graced Unfair Park back in May 2009. (And one of his Lucky Monkey magnets stares at me all day every day.) Turns out, the Art Pets highlighted today date back to September...

By Robert Wilonsky

December 7, 2010

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I see Paste's blog has given an awful nice shout-out to local artist Chet Phillips, whose military monkeys graced Unfair Park back in May 2009. (And one of his Lucky Monkey magnets stares at me all day every day.) Turns out, the Art Pets highlighted today date back to September. But Phillips does have a brand-new collection of trading cards that's turning out to be quite the good gift this holiday season: the Union of Superlative Heroes Trading Card Set, so called because the set of 20 imagines "an alternate world in which Steampunk Superheroes inhabit a Victorian society."

Phillips tells Unfair Park he sold 160 packs in 24 hours, following some mighty good blogpress here and here and here in recent days. On Saturday he reluctantly sold the remaining 20 packs -- in less than an hour.

"I had a small run, not really expecting the wonderfulness of the response," he says. But at this very moment he's prepping an additional 500 packs that arrived earlier this afternoon. Problem is, he still has to handcut the cards, which come in sheets. "And I don't know how many of them I can put together in the next day. That's the crazy part of it. Obviously, something's going to have to change."

He expects to put more sets on sale first thing in the morning. Check his Etsy shop, the earlier the better. I already ordered mine.

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