‘Menko Boys’, Antwan Horfee’s Collection of Vintage Cards

Since his first trip to Japan in 2007, Antwan Horfee has been collecting Japanese card games, menko. These little rectangular cards feature, depending on when they were released, manga characters, famous sportspeople, actors, and even characters from American cartoons. Possessing over 300 cards, the artist decided to bring them together in the most magnificent of collections, the book Menko Boys, which reproduces his most attractive cards, dating from the 1930s up to the early 1980s.

The artist, known under a pseudonym, is a notorious figure in the field of graffiti. His universe is the result of various inspirations like the world of tattoo art, the Japanese Gutai movement, or the Nordic CoBra movement, but also vintage cartoons. It was particularly through the latter that Antwan Horfee began to take an interest in Japanese culture, and he gradually started collecting these playing cards, the rules for which are simple: try to knock over your opponent’s cards with your own in order to score a point. 

Cards illustrated with popular stars

This game, born in around 1700, was initially played with round pieces of dried clay, stamped with the face of a person or an animal. Over the decades, the clay came to be replaced with wood, then paper, then lead, before menko appeared in cardboard form in around 1880. This new material was the idea of a businessman from Osaka, Taro Naruse. 

On the first cards, the profiles of famous actors, wrestlers, or baseball players were depicted in bright colours. In the 1920s, Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop appeared on these cards, which were a hit with young Japanese boys. Then came superheroes and manga characters in the second half of the 19th century, like Tetsujin 28, Kamen Rider, and Rock Holmes. However, the 1980s saw the decline of menko, as their popularity waned and they were replaced by a plastic, less-illustrated version: Pogs. 

Menko Boys Book (2019) by Antwan Horfee, is published by Top Safe/Wrong Culture Edition.