Friendly Dictators Trading Cards: Featuring 36 of America's Most Embarrassing Allies

Friendly Dictators Trading Cards

Some Notes About this Site:
Other websites featuring the cards are available (I say this because this place has a tendency to get slashdotted). Sites with images: here, here and here; sites with text only here, here and here, among others. Some of the text sites include updates.
Please note this is not an official site of Eclipse Enterprises or anyone associated with the original production of these trading cards. I have no information as to how to contact Eclipse or of how to obtain copies of the card set featured here, or of other Eclipse card sets and comics. To the best of my knowledge, Eclipse Enterprises no longer exists, and its products are not available except secondhand. (See below for more information on Eclipse Enterprises.)
The copyright in the material featured on this site is, presumably, still held by the original authors and publishers. Visitors to the site should bear this in mind in relation to any use they make of the material here. If any of the original authors and publishers, or whoever currently holds the copyrights, objects to this material being displayed here, they should contact my ISP and I will cheerfully remove the material from the Web. Given the material's educative nature, and the fact that the original publisher is apparently defunct and its products no longer available commercially, I hope there will be no such objections. (Objections not connected to the copyright in these works, particularly those of a political nature, are of no interest to me. I have no desire to hear from anyone who has a problem with the reputation of one of their sub-fascist heroes being besmirched by historical fact, or from any specimen of the wide-ranging species of idiot who confuses nationalism with a slavish defense of anything and everything done by whatever bunch of thugs and spivs happen to be running their country this week.)
As the copyright notice on each page makes clear, the factual material on this site was written in 1990. Much of what is stated as current has now passed into history. Many of the extant dictatorships listed here have since fallen, or been retired as their sponsors have found more effective measures to shape the world to the will of corporate plutocracy. (Sorry if that sounds a bit Bolshie.) For more up to date information on US Foreign Policy, human rights abuses and the general spread of inequality, oppression and corporate power, check with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, Covert Action Quarterly, Multinational Monitor, Z Magazine, Counterpunch (a personal favourite), Third World Resurgence, In These Times, The Nation and The Progressive, or with the yearly United States State Department Report on Human Rights, if you need a laugh.
Some brief notes about this site's structure: The three line copyright information at the bottom of each page is also three separate links - to this page, to the Index page and to a page about the authors. The cards are laid out on pages organised by region. Each card image links to a larger image of the entire card. Anything else you need to know about the site should be blindingly obvious. Every effort has been made to reproduce the written material exactly as it appeared on the back of each card - but feel free to assume any errors are mine.
Eclipse Enterprises:
Eclipse Enterprises was founded in 1977 by brothers Jan and Dean Mullaney and originally run out of a converted garage at their home in Forestville, California. The company quickly gained a reputation for producing comics that dealt with issues that the major publishers avoided. Journalist Catherine Yronwode joined Eclipse as an editor in 1981 and, with writer Joyce Brabner, persuaded the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors to fund Eclipse's anti-war comic "Real War Stories". A Georgia court injunction preventing the CCCO from distributing the comic for free at a high school career day was overturned by the Georgia State Supreme Court. Eclipse went on to publish "Brought to Light", a comic book series featuring factual accounts of CIA covert operations in Central America. These reality-based comics led to a series of trading card sets on similar political and non-mainstream themes: "Drug Wars", "The Iran Contra Scandal", "Serial Killers", "Rotten to the Core - New York Political Scandal" and "Friendly Dictators".
Much of the above information comes from Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book "Media Virus", as does the following quote:
“[The Trading Cards were] ... an even more ingenious conduit for activist ideologies than comics. "Trading cards, sports cards, were already nonfiction," [Yronwode] explains. "It's the most effective bait and switch because the person thinks, 'Oh, I'm gonna get a bunch of little fact cards here about famous people.' And they do. But they find out that the Premier of some Latin American country was a convicted rapist. That the CIA supported him until he assassinated some dude in Africa. It's all right there in your face. And they don't know how to turn it off because it's on a trading card and a trading card is true." ... Unlike a comic book, which has a linear order, a trading card is a tiny unit by itself and can be arranged in any manner. Yronwode says this feature is not coincidental: "Our trading cards are designed so they read like Hypercard stacks. Each cross-references to other cards ... They all connect, and you can rearrange them in chains of interconnectivity. Or chronologically. You can find out who someone's boss was, how different people moved around, that this guy was in Vietnam at the same time as this guy, and then that they were both in Nicaragua at the same time, too." ... In this absurdly simplistic context [of trading cards], the complexities of behind-the-scenes government corruption are reduced to blatant and clear-cut violations of the public trust. Meanwhile the viral shell of "trading" cards promotes the idea that kids should be passing these memes around.”
In 1997, Eclipse had another legal success when a U.S. federal appeals court struck down a Nassau County, New York law banning the sale of trading cards depicting "any heinous crime". The court found for Eclipse who had challenged the law on First Amendment grounds - cf: Eclipse Enterprises, Inc. v. Gulotta (U.S. Federal Court of Appeal, 2nd Circuit, December 1997). The expense of this court case seems to have bankrupted them - at any rate, for whatever reason, Eclipse appears to have folded. There are no web entries for the company, no listing in any of the Publishing Indexes I've been able to find, and all its products are out of print, as far as the big web booksellers are concerned. So who knows - maybe, they just found something else to do with their time. If they are still around and don't want me messing with their stuff, they have only to ask and I'll take the site down. Unless and until that happens, please enjoy...

Robert Weaver