The PopCulteer
November 14, 2025

As I have mentioned many times here in PopCult, one of my other gigs is that I am a contributing writer to Non Sport Update, the magazine devoted to the non sport trading card hobby.

Well, I have some good news, and I have some bad news.

The good news is that the latest issue of NSU, featuring a new card set based on Star Trek on the cover, goes on sale starting this weekend nationwide.

The bad news, as you might notice on the banner across the top of the cover, is that this will be the final issue.

These are not great days for print media. Magazines are dropping like flies and have been for years. Competition from the internet, which can cover developments in hobbies instantly, has eaten away at most of the niche magazine market.

The non sport hobby itself is seeing a pretty major shift as Topps, which was acquired by the sports merchandising behemoth, Fanatics, seems less inclined than ever to explore or exploit non-sport topics.

The really exciting stuff happening in the hobby is the work of smaller companies using internet-based crowdfunding to create loads of new and exciting non-sports cards. The only downside to this development is that with these small producers, the cost of advertising in a print magazine just does not provide a great return on their investment. It’s risky to advertise a Kickstarter campaign when you have to have the ad submitted two months in advance.

Non Sport Update‘s publisher, Beckett Media, has run into a few problems of its own, with a collapse of their card-grading business and some high-profile misadventures that have caused a shake-up of their finances and management team.

It simply got to a point where they could not afford to keep publishing Non Sport Update.

Good Times

I’m really going to miss the gig. My editor, Alan Beigel, was a joy to work with and never got too irritated if I blew a deadline. Harris Toser, the son of the founders of the magazine, stayed on when NSU was sold to Beckett back in 2016, and kept the magazine feeling like a family organization, even with new corporate owners. I’d be happy to work with these guys on any projects they might have come up in the future.

It was really cool to be able to walk into Barnes & Nobel or Books A Million and find a magazine that I wrote for on the stands. I’m going to miss that little bit of joy. I feel lucky that I got to contribute to this beloved institution that was created by Roxanne and Marlin Toser back in 1991. I am proud to say I was a contributor to this magazine.

I wrote for Non Sport Update, I think, for 28 years, after being recommended for the job by John Michlig. I started out covering action figures for them, but after two or three issues they realized that their readers didn’t really care about action figures, and instead of showing me the door, they invited me to stick around and write about trading cards.

I was glad to do it, even though, at the time, I was not an avid collector. I collected the Dinosaurs Attacks card set, and I’d been a fan of Wacky Packages since I was a kid. I also bought the reissue of the Batman trading cards from the 1960s, but in most ways I was a novice.

That’s changed quite a bit in the nearly three decades since. I really got into the hobby and I learned from the experts, who were my colleagues at NSU. I had the thrill of having a few of my articles illustrated by the late Jay Lynch, who was one of my underground cartoonist heroes, and I’ve made dozens of friends along the way.

Writing for NSU also forced me to new levels of professionalism as I tackled the occasional subject about which I knew nothing, and had to research it intensely so I didn’t come off as totally clueless. More than once I wrote a feature article about a TV show or movie that I’d never watched (and in some cases, still haven’t–sorry iCarly).

Non-Sport And Pop Culture

When I began writing this blog, several years after I began with NSU, my editor at the time asked me to avoid covering non-sport cards in PopCult, since they were paying me to write about them for NSU. I felt that was a reasonable request, and except for the occasional Kickstarter Alert, I’ve stuck with that.

Going forward, you can probably expect more in-depth coverage of non-sport cards in PopCult. Over the years I have become a big fan of Richard Parks of RRParksCards, and Robert Jimenez of ZeroStreet, as well as some other folks who do great card sets like Christopher Irving and Kurt Kuersteiner and others, and I’ll be telling you more about them in the future. I may even finish my history of Wacky Packages cards here.

My last article for NSU covered a new card set from Todd Riley and NostalgiCards based on the movie, Metropolis. This set took 30 years to bring to fruition, and you can read about it in that final issue of Non Sport Update. That set will be launching on Kickstarter soon, and I’ll remind you about that when it happens.

I have to be honest here and say that this was not exactly a shock to me. I’ve sort of been expecting the “pencils down” email since the magazine was sold to Beckett almost ten years ago. That feeling has gotten stronger over the last year. It’s to Beckett’s credit that they kept it going as long as they did.

I want to thank The Tosers, my long-suffering editor, Alan, and the many friends I’ve made along the way. I hope some of them join me as I begin to mix non-sport trading cards into the pop culture soup that is PopCult.

That is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day, as well as our regular features. The 2025 PopCult Gift Guide will resume on Monday, and I am seriously considering extending it for a week into December this year, so I’ll let you know if that happens.