For instance, Wolverine received separate listing for his brown costume, yellow costume, and for his “Patch”-era costume, Spider-Man received a card for his regular red and blues and his black costume, and both green Hulk and grey Hulk got cards. The cards hit all the major players of 1990, and many characters received multiple cards depicting several costumes and/or variations they’ve had over the years. While some of the info has clearly been pulled straight out of somebody’s poop-chute (I doubt the wins, losses and ties of battles fought is accurate, in other words) each standard character card gave you a name, height, group affiliation, weight, powers, major enemies, nicknames, first appearance, concise origin and a bonus piece of trivia. The cards themselves are miniature miracles of information, like tiny traveling Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe pages. It’s not hard to see why these grabbed so many people. But still, in a strange way, it was nice for a large amount of people to find pleasure in something that had been with me my entire life. Looking back, it’s easy to see that it was just a weird passing fad, like pet rocks, slap bracelets, or fidget spinners. I am not exaggerating when I say that the fervor was so insane that teachers were in on it. When you saw a sad box with a few remaining packages left in the bottom then you knew you had better grab them and hang on tight, because you just got lucky. Once they hit the “mainstream,” it was nearly impossible to find the cards. It was the most surreal experience to watch, and probably one of the only times when I was on the cutting edge of a trend. If you’re familiar with the scene in Ferris Bueller where the secretary rattles off all of the high school cliques, these damned cards united all of them. In 1990 I was in high school, and there were kids who I knew with absolute certainty had never seen the inside of a comic since they were in single digits walking around with fat stacks of cards in their jacket pockets. It was relatively quiet, so when the trading cards seemed to make everybody around me an overnight Marvel fan, it was kind of a shock. Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 was just beginning to show how insane it would get, with media attention and headlines and furor. Batman had yet to be broken, Superman hadn’t died yet, Image wasn’t a thing, Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld were just artists on Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants. The comic market had yet to hit that big boom of foil covers and mass panic. Sure, after the 1989 Batman movie it seemed like everyone was a Batman fan, but for the most part comic-book movies were relegated to the direct-to-video market - if they were made at all - and the local comic book shop was occupied by the usual suspects. In 1990 comic books were still very much living in their own niche. It would have sucked for them to disappear from stores before I could get a set. I still remember that long delay between the first time I saw an advertisement in a comic for Impel’s first series of Marvel trading cards and finding that first pack while standing in the checkout line of a grocery store.Īt the time, I figured this would be a passing thing, one that would pop up briefly and flame out as fast as it had debuted, so I knew I had to be fast about tracking down as many as I could. Marrying that long-time love of comic books and superheroes and an appreciation of trading cards made this the perfect line to collect. That all changed with the debut of Impel’s first series of Marvel Trading Cards. It was more about that thrill of finding rare cards than it was the love of the players, so it was missing that certain “spark” that I got from the collection when I was a kid. Once I hit high school, I got pulled into collecting baseball cards despite no interest in watching the actual game. Garbage Pail Kids were a brief obsession as well. I remember collecting cards from properties as diverse as Return of the Jedi and Dukes of Hazzard. They were affordable, took up very little space, and were readily available. For a brief time, it seemed like everybody, everywhere, was a Marvel fan.Īs a kid, I had a dabbling interest in trading cards.
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