Roots and Beginnings: Marvel Universe Trading Cards

I’ll start this post with an apology: I am deeply sorry for firing this double-barrel buckshot blast of nostalgia at you with no advance warning. For comics fans of a certain age – and I’m deliberately making the distinction between “fans” and “readers” here, for obvious reasons – the series of trading-card sets featuring Marvel Comics characters released during those halcyon days of the early ‘90s are frequently more responsible for our knowledge of those characters, and more influential on our view of the universe they inhabit, than the comics themselves. Hell, I don’t think I’d so much as read a single Marvel comic book in my life, other than the Spider-Man ones my folks would buy me from the Te-Amo if I behaved myself in church when I was four, when I spent several years of said life collecting these cards with a voracious passion. 

I don’t think it’s the haze of memory speaking here: These are tremendous little pop-culture artifacts. The collision of bold, clunky design, increasingly lurid art (that Joe Jusko “Marvel Masterpieces” series certainly opened my eyes; to this day I’m not entirely convinced I didn’t date Silver Sable), hotly debated stats for each character’s strength, speed, agility, etc. (how exciting when you found one who maxed out!), factoids and landmark stories that convinced you the Marvel Universe was a truly endless place – all contained on a tiny sliver of cardstock. Even the combination of genuinely iconic and important characters with forgotten also-rans (Foolkiller!) was a tonic to young minds eager to construct wheat/chaff sorting systems of their own rather than rely on received wisdom. Each trading card was a postcard from a brighter, bolder, brawnier world.

The deleterious aspect of it all, of course, is that the cards further divorced creations from creators, marginalizing not only the minds that devised them (with the possible exception of Stan Lee, who got a card of his own, naturally) but the writers and artists shepherding them at the time. In that sense they were in micro what the Marvel movies would be in macro starting one decade later: a way to convince the world that the characters had lives of their own, that they were their own authors. The trick for fans and readers and viewers alike, I think, is to maintain the sense of wonder at boundless imagination while never losing sight of whose imaginations we’re wondering at.