Marvel Trading Cards
Impel's 1990 Marvel Universe set turned the comic shop into a card shop: heroes, villains and famous battles with stats on the back, and five holograms hiding roughly one to a box. For five years the binder pages, the Power Ratings and the hunt for a Cosmic Spider-Man were as much a part of being a Marvel kid as the comics themselves.
Impel Marketing was brand new in 1990, the non-tobacco half of a corporate split at cigarette maker Liggett, and its Marvel Universe Series I was built like a sports-card set. There were 162 base cards, the last one a checklist, sorted into Super Heroes, Super Villains, Rookies, Famous Battles and Team Pictures, each with a character or event on the front and stats and a short bio on the back. The set even carried a Stan Lee card and a run of "Spider-Man Presents" interview cards. The chase was five holograms, Cosmic Spider-Man, Magneto, Silver Surfer, Wolverine and Spider-Man vs. Green Goblin, inserted at roughly one per box, or about one in 36 packs.
Series II in 1991 kept the 162-plus-five format, introduced Power Ratings, and came with its own binder and Impel binder pages, which is why so many of these cards survive in nine-pocket sheets. Impel renamed itself SkyBox International in April 1992, and Series III that year grew to 200 cards with holograms tinted a different color for each character (Wolverine blue, Hulk green) plus factory tins numbered to 10,000. The same year brought an X-Men set of all-new Jim Lee art with its own gold holograms as the chase. Series IV in 1993 hid a Spider-Man vs. Venom hologram in one of every 180 packs and turned its first 135 cards into nine-card puzzle pictures, and Series V in 1994 added clear plastic "suspended animation" cards promoting the Saturday-morning cartoon.
The comic-card boom peaked about as fast as the comic boom did. Marvel Entertainment announced it was buying SkyBox in March 1995 for $150 million, closed the deal in May and merged it with Fleer as Fleer/SkyBox International, whose Ultra lines pushed the X-Men into glossier premium sets; the card company was sold on again in February 1999. The 1990 set was never rare, and plenty of it still sits unopened, but it remains the cornerstone of Marvel card collecting and, for a lot of people, the first card set they ever chased.
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