Gareb Shamus’ ArtPics:
The Trading Cards Shaping an Inevitable Future
Written by Leigh Pennington
Published on April 6th, 2026
Gareb Shamus has spent years identifying and shaping culture, he created and published Wizard Magazine – THE leading comic book publication for decades – he also helped launch conventions like Wizard World and Ace Comic Con, along with magazines including InQuest Gamer, ToyFare, and Anime Insider. Now, he is applying that same instinct to his latest creation: ArtPics trading cards.
These cards are small-scale, hand-created works that you can touch, collect, and treasure; crafted by a range of notable and rising artists like King Saladeen, Downtown DaVinci, Bosslogic, Sweeney Boo, Hallie Hart, Jen Ray, Lee Tal and more. Each card is encapsulated, authenticated, UV protected, labeled, and minted.
ArtPics Cards are the culmination of Shamus’ professional and personal history.
ArtPics Cards are the culmination of Shamus’ professional and personal history. The very first card that Shamus produced was his own work which evolved from his journey as a visual artist. In 2015, Shamus decided to take a break from Comic Con to pursue a more creative path. He dabbled in writing screenplays and developing his own characters, yet found the whole process rather unsatisfactory. ”My brain was working way faster than my fingers, and I found it to be very frustrating. Also I was so used to having an end product that I could share with people, and writing a script didn’t have that…There wasn’t this concept of writing a script that I could share with everybody. To me, my cycle is, I get a magazine, I put it out, people read it. We get the gratification of sharing that with everybody on earth. So in the process of then not being able to share my writing in a way that I liked, I thought ‘Well, what if I did some painting?’”
For Shamus, connecting to a larger audience had long been the raison d’etre of most of his professional career. His aspirations for his own work were no different. He recalled, “How do I share my painting with people? How do I reach out to people? If I extrude the paint off the canvas to reach out, that’s my way of connecting with people.”
Courtesy of his experience with designing covers for Wizard, Shamus already possessed a strong sense of color and design theory. His process of placing small individual elevated drops of paint yielded large fluid shapes and compositions. He explained, “I settled on pastry tools, piping bags… I would mix my own colors, and then, I was able to come up with these patterns that, to me, represented positive energy of a journey, or growth, all these kinds of themes.”
He found this process very meditative, but tedious. “I always found my art to be inconvenient because, it takes me 25 to 100 plus hours to make a piece, and I have to do it on wood. So to do a large piece, it’s heavy, it’s really hard to ship and handle…As much as I love it and I enjoy the process of it, I just kept finding that the more I painted, the more I wanted to go smaller and smaller.”
At the suggestion of his brother and on the heels of his business endeavour StarPics (celebrity autograph trading cards featuring well-known personas such as Robert De Niro and Ozzy Osbourne), Shamus decided to take the encapsulated format of StarPics and apply it to his own work. “So I started making baseball card size paintings. What’s great about it is that what happened in the comic book world, and happened in the sports card world, and with Magic the Gathering and Pokémon, is once cards became encapsulated and authenticated in these holders, all of a sudden the secondary market went parabolic, meaning that you will not question the authenticity of this piece ever again.”
Currently the majority of collectors and buyers do not transact art in the secondary market. Shamus posed the question, “When was the last time you bought a painting or a piece of art and then resold it? Practically never.” Art purchases come with a personal emotional and financial stake. It is not something people relinquish with ease. Not to mention the logistics involved in selling and moving complex or large works.
Secondary transactions on art typically occur either through the gallery system where it was purchased, or through traditional auction houses such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams, Phillips, Heritage, etc. The number of pieces sold in dollars is extremely high, a near $60 billion a year market, one of the largest in the world. Yet the number of paintings or pieces of art that get sold in the secondary market on an annual basis, in terms of units, is small, compared to the dollar amount. In contrast, eBay sells over 50,000 trading cards a day, more units in one day than the auction houses combined will collectively sell during an entire year. Encapsulation made all this possible, because people could transact in the secondary market and trust that the item is authentic.
Shamus explained what this system of buying and trading will mean when applied to the art world via his ArtPics Cards. “If the buying, selling, and trading of art follows the pattern of the other industries you’re looking at potentially a $50 billion plus marketplace. The art industry has never seen that liquidity before. It doesn’t replace what’s going on in the traditional art world. If I want a three foot by three foot piece for my home, or an artist wants to create something that’s masterful in size, no card is going to replace the impact that piece will have. So this is something that will enhance the art world and give a lot more opportunities for people to transact and buy pieces from the artists that they like. Also, quite frankly, there’s an affordability component to it.”
Ranging from $200 to upwards of $1,000 or more, ArtPics are not only affordable in comparison with larger works, but are also accessible in the sense that they can be handled and inspected at close range without fear of damage.
Ranging from $200 to upwards of $1,000 or more, ArtPics are not only affordable in comparison with larger works, but are also accessible in the sense that they can be handled and inspected at close range without fear of damage. Shamus elaborated on the influence that this tactile ability will have on artists when representing their work. “When I go places and I meet an artist, and I say to them, oh, you’re an artist. Can I see your art? What do you think they do? They pull out their phones to show me their art. But you know what I do? I pull out my art (the card) and they freak out. That’s going to become very normal. Every artist in the world is going to want to have their art in their pocket that they could show people. This is what I do. This is my calling card.”
The close proximity to the artist and their work is elevated by the fact that both sides of the card are visible. Tiny personal doodles, signatures, and other traces of the artist’s presence is a very notable feature, giving the cards a greater gravitas; a handwritten letter of encounter and process.
On the back of Jeremy Penn’s mixed media collage card is a list of materials used: wheat paste posters NYC circa 1993/1997/2020, acrylic, and spray paint. The cards also present artists with the opportunity to gain new skills. How to go small but maintain a large impact. Shamus expounded, “What happens now is artists have to start thinking about their art a little differently. People collect art, but art is not a collectible. Now they have to start thinking about art as a collectible, and what they need to do by creating a certain series.”
This new consideration of art as a collectible also places significance back on the work itself, something that can be inadvertently pushed to the background.
This new consideration of art as a collectible also places significance back on the work itself, something that can be inadvertently pushed to the background. Most of the time headlines will mention what a work sold for, not how or why it was made (we all recall the “banana and duct tape” work Comedian by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, which sold at a Sotheby’s auction in November 2024 for $6.2 million.) As Fran Lebowitz observed when discussing the focus on the monetary value of a work rather than the brilliance or meaning of its execution, “they applaud the price, not the Picasso.”
ArtPics gives artists another method of selling their work through a brand new medium, a “chance to share their art with more people…What’s going to happen now is artists are going to emerge as card artists.” Shamus added, “when you listen to people talk about what’s going on in the art world, there’s a negative blanket over it, in that sales are down. People don’t know what they’re looking for, but yet, the biggest pieces in the world are setting record prices. So there’s this kind of disconnect, because for the right piece of art there’s unlimited money, but yet, it’s harder for current artists to sell their art.”
Shamus has long had a beat on recognizing the coming influence of overlooked artistic forms. Pushing back against the curatorial gatekeepers of society by creating platforms of visibility that distinguish rather than conform.
Shamus has long had a beat on recognizing the coming influence of overlooked artistic forms. Pushing back against the curatorial gatekeepers of society by creating platforms of visibility that distinguish rather than conform. “I remember back in the early days, I would talk to traditional Fine Art gallerists and dealers and people about comic book art, and they would laugh at me. It was never considered a serious form of art. Then, as kids grew up and started becoming character based artists, all of a sudden, the art world needed to pay attention to the new crop of artists. This was their voice, this was their lens for seeing the world.”
Shamus drew a line of prevalence and influence that the Todd McFarlane’s and Jim Lee’s of the comic book universe had on past and current generations of artists. “In the crazy world that we live in, there’s always people that you want to look up to, and who can you look up to? The people that I want to say disappoint the least are these superheroes. You could find someone in the superhero world that can replicate the issues that you might be going through as a human and see how they deal with them in their own superheroic way. It could be the opposite too. It’s not only your ego, it’s your alter ego. It’s who you either want to project to be, or it’s maybe who you’re trying to avoid to be. It’s approachability that now artists have brought to their art.”
Various artistic styles and executions are celebrated and represented by the cards, from contemporary to mixed-media to abstract and beyond. However there is a noticeable presence of characters found in the pages of comic books.
Various artistic styles and executions are celebrated and represented by the cards, from contemporary to mixed-media to abstract and beyond. However there is a noticeable presence of characters found in the pages of comic books. Sweeney Boo’s card Schiaparelli-Fall 2022 features an ever-sultry Poison Ivy with her signature fiery red locks and come hither to be envenomed eyes, but she is dressed in the haute couture of a famed fashion house. Jen Ray’s Miz America proudly features in her card #1 Pow Pow Pow giving the viewer a punch to the face with her American eagle statement ring. A vibrant palette of yellow contrasting the onomatopoeia’s of “POW!” carefully placed in the background. Not to mention Bosslogic’s rendering of the Dark Knight as a more delightfully unhinged figure in his card The Bat.
Shamus has built a career on identifying shifts in culture early and turning them into reality. “I can’t pick lottery numbers, but I have a good knack for understanding and knowing what people want before they know it. But it goes a step further, because I think everybody has that skill. They just don’t exercise it. I’ve been able to hone that skill for a long time…not only figuring out what people want in the future, but then materializing that in a way so people can actually see it. People know that the world needs to move in that way. They just don’t know what it looks like or what that thing is going to be. I think I know how to show it to them in such a way that it becomes obvious.”
@lb_pennington