For a while now I've been quite obsessed with the trading card game that came out in Bionicle's first year, Quest for the Masks. I traded a friend for a couple cards back then and I always cherished them, and more recently I've been working on collecting them in earnest. One of my main milestones was being able to get a complete collection of the cards featuring a comic style illustration of the characters with a little story blurb on the backs. More recently it seems a company involved in the production of these cards unearthed some original inked sketches and began selling them on ebay, and I jumped at the chance to have a tiny bit of Bionicle history.
To date I have 7 cards worth of sketches, and I've been scanning them all so that others can see the original line work that went in to these cards. I think they're rather neat!
Please note: the images in this post are cropped and shrunken from the full sized scans, please go HERE to see the full sized scans!
I've decided to list them in reverse order since its roughly the order I got them in and it leaves the most interesting for last. I've also included an image of the final card art for comparison.
Card No. 282 Manas vs. Tahu
This was the first one I got, I was always a fan of this art, as there's so few depictions of the Manas. Getting the sketch made me really realise how messed up Tahu's arm was.
Card No. 273 Nui-Rama Patrol
Quite a lot of card art has been listed on ebay, but I limited myself to just one of each of the 5 Rahi because I'm not made of money, and also I don't want to hoard everything for myself. I hope all the other art has gone to loving homes. Thankfully the photographs on the ebay listings are quite good, but I urge any who also purchased these, or who have any other rare Bionicle materials in their possession, to please scan them and share them!
Card No. 263 Nui-Jaga Underground
These first few cards are all from the later Rahi Challenge expansion. While the initial release of cards contained several story cards dedicated to the Toa and Turaga this expansion focused on the Rahi, each of the main 5 pairs getting seven whole cards!
Card No. 262 Infected Tarakava
The interesting thing about this art is, outside of the special painted Infected Hau from the Muaka and Kane-Ra set, this is one of the few depictions of the Rahi bearing infected Kanohi masks! Each rahi has one Infected card in this expansion.
Card No. 133 Walk Quietly
Now we're out of the Rahi expansion and in to the first wave of cards. Even though the focus was the Toa the Rahi still made many appearances, even very rare ones like the Tarakava-Nui. The orange background of this art really makes it pop out from the other Kopaka ones.
Card No. 111 Tahu vs. Dragon Lizards
Now this one is very interesting. The sketches were seemingly all drawn on larger layout sheets that had space for two images and were later cut down, but occasionally you will see ones that remained together. This Tahu card art was paired with an Onua one, a very interesting Onua one.
Also it doesn't really break my Rahi rule since it features the Hikaki :)
Card No. 105 Onua vs. Manas
This is kinda underwhelming. Yeah its the background, but there's no characters!
What made this listing so interesting was that it also contained two loose sheets of paper, one of Onua.
And one of a....Manas??
This is why I had to break my rule and jump on this right away, its a depiction of the prototype Manas! Its such a rare thing. Being able to see the full art not obscured by Onua's body is such a treat.
Looking at it its most likely based on this image, so there isn't really much NEW here, but its fascinating all the same. I've tried my hand at reverse engineering them a few times, with varying amounts of success. We only have this one image of both of them, its tragic.
And just for my own curiosity, here's a quick and dirty edit of the 3 elements recombined. overlaying the final card really shows how much was cropped out for the final card. I wonder if it was cropped before or after colouring...
Also as a small note, its interesting that these two Toa's fifth cards were grouped together on one sheet. This pattern seems to have held true for other cards, as the next cards in their series', where they have their golden masks and Makoki stones, also shared a sheet.
But then some earlier cards have multiple illustrations of one Toa on one sheet.
Its intriguing.
Its just very cool to look at these, and see the real pencil and pen placed on the paper over a quarter of a century ago. I will cherish these always. I like to display them along with the final card. I've only just gotten the Onua and Tahu ones so I've yet to mount them.
(I was very happy about being able to play Bloodborne at the time.)
