![]() As the company’s top editor, DeFalco didn’t have much time to manage the project alongside the exploding comics market - “They were not one of my highest priorities,” he told Polygon on a recent call - because he was managing the expectations of a hungry board of directors who expected Marvel to continue delivering on the huge sales that the company was generating. Marvel’s then-editor-in-chief, Tom DeFalco, put special projects editor Bob Budiansky in charge of putting together a new card set with trading card company Impel. It was a natural fit.Ī card from Marvel and Impel’s 1990 Marvel Universe run Image: Courtesy of Marvel Comics One of those ways was the trading card market. With sales up across the company and new titles and traditional top line characters both doing brisk business, Marvel looked for other ways to make money. Marvel dominated, grabbing around two-thirds of the market. The advent of the trade paperback as a universal part of the comic reading experience was still a ways off, leading collectors to snap up first issues and special editions of various comics. A speculator’s market in comic books was behind it all lower print runs of popular stories in years prior made scarcity mean value. The company was riding what was, at the time, an unprecedented high. The comic book industry was booming in 1990, and nowhere was that boom felt more than at Marvel Headquarters. The mystical art of alternate revenue sources And history suggests the success of the cards changed the course of Marvel’s history. Without the stats and ratings on the back, the cards likely wouldn’t have been as successful, even with the rabid comic fans at the time. Marvel’s foray into trading cards paralleled the company’s boom and bust fortunes of the ’90s. The rankings gave enthusiasts concrete numbers to point to when arguing over character attributes and helped fuel the crossover comic trading card business. In the early 1990s, Marvel Comics released a series of popular trading card sets called “Marvel Universe” that changed fan debates forever by using power rankings to assign relative ability levels to different characters. Prepare yourself for Polygon's Who Would Win Week. ![]() ![]() One eternal question spans all of pop culture: "Who would win?" That's why we're dedicating an entire week to debates that have shaped comics, movies, TV, and games, for better and worse.
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