The Dark Horse Comics Coop Poker Set

Hey ya’ll I’m back at it again with another weird curio I found on the internet. As ya’ll know I consider myself something of a gamer; but that doesn’t just apply to video games I love games of all sorts. Sports, tabletop RPGs, board games, trading cards, and especially a little bit of gambling. So imagine my surprise when, while looking for a new poker set to throw around with the boys, that there actually existed a set themed around famous hotrod artist Chris Cooper.

Now is ya’ll don’t know what a hotrod artist is it’s basically a twitter artist for boomers they draw cool imagery based around cars, hot women, skulls, motorcycles, demons, acid trip gremlins. Basically when I tell you to imagine a cartoon tattoo parlor, all the classic americona imagery that springs to mind, that’s hotrod art. And Chris Cooper, known mainly by his stage name Coop, is like the poster child of the art style. Look him up his art rules.

Anyway I start looking around trying to find info on anything about this poker set, and there are plenty of listings of it for sale, but they all use the same low quality image from Dark Horse that look to be lazily scanned from a stock catalog. You can’t find any images of the chips themselves it’s almost exclusively find pictures for the BR Poker Pro collection, which are manufactured on demand casino quality ceramic chips you pay for by the chip, and some limited edition licensed chips from the Hard Rock Casino being sold by collectors. Nobody has any high quality images of this weird home set despite it being listed for sale on multiple websites.

so I bought one.

Feast your eyes upon the officially licensed Coop Deluxe Poker Set, designed and manufactured by Dark Horse Comics in 2006.

As you can see here it’s housed in a black aluminum toolbox with a hard plastic handle and a metal locking clasp to keep it closed when stored. The Coop branding seems to just be some cheap decals slapped onto the case so I assume it’s just an off the shelf toolbox bought wholesale and then retrofitted with inserts to keep the contents secure, but it’s nice and sturdy, it won’t crumble in you drop it on your garage floor or anything. It even helpfully, came with a foam pad on top to fill out the lid so if you do drop it it’ll keep all the goodies inside from flying everywhere.

Now the actual contents of the box shouldn’t be surprising you can get a description of what it includes on any website, even Dark Horse’s website, they haven’t taken down the original catalog listing. I’m shocked at how wild the quality varies from item to item though you can tell some corners were cut to keep this set cheap for the teenagers who frequent Dark Horse comic books.

In the kit you get 50 each of 4 colored stacks of chips, in standard green, blue, black, and red. No white chips interestingly enough, usually the white chips are the designated lowest value in a stack. These are all fairly high quality plastic of some sort, extremely durable and the image of the Coop devil is screen printed on and not raised from the plastic at all, these will hold up very well against being slammed around and dropped on the floor and having beer dumped on them, while also being soft enough not to scuff up a felt table if you’re a hoity toity poker player like that.

You also get some extra goodies in this kit that aren’t necessary for a game of poker, namely a designated dealer button and a set 0f 5 dice, and these are opposite ends of the quality spectrum entirely. The dealer button is a large thick slab of chromed plastic and despite being sealed in a shrink wrapped box, inside a small plastic baggy, this thing is beat to shit and scuffed all over it. you can see scratch marks and pockets all over it, it just feels incredibly cheap. The dice on the other hand, appear to be made of brushed steel and feel super good. They’re very heave in the hand and the edges have been polished down perfectly so they won’t dig into your fingers or the table. They are however, seemingly untreated and you can see here even after being shrinkwrapped, and inside another shrinkwrapped container, they have oxidized somewhat in storage.

And onto our final inclusion in this kit, the playing cards! Now you can see here I have 2 separate sets of these. Technically I have 3 of these Coop decks now, the poker set comes with 2 decks, and they are astonishingly low quality. it’s like handling untreated cardstock you would use in your home of office printer, they feel very flimsy and not at all resistant to liquid spills, handle these babies with care if you care at all about them. Or don’t, because this same deck of cards was re-licensed by the adult novelties and pornogrophy company Wood Rocket Entertainment, and are still manufactured and sold to this day.

It’s actually quite interesting to compare the two decks of cards as they use a LOT of the same artwork, most of the cards in the earlier Dark Horse deck feature the same art just zoomed in and cropped significantly to hide any nudity present in the images, although some of it is actually unique art not found in the later Wood Rocket branded deck. So While I will probably just replace the cheap papery cards in the poker kit with the new er release I will keep the Dark Horse decks in storage for posterity. I love interesting little cutting room floor things like this that a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily notice or care about.