Superman's First Trading Cards, and Why Fewer Than One in Five Grade Above a PSA 5

A penny a pack, a rubber band, and eighty-five years.

Seventy-two cards, a penny a pack, printed in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1940. Fewer than one in five that have been graded come back at PSA 6 or better, and the reasons are more specific than "they are old".

This is the set people mean when they talk about Superman's first cards. Whether that description is accurate is a question I will come back to, because it probably is not.

What it actually is

Gum, Inc. of Philadelphia issued 72 cards, catalogued as R145 in Jefferson Burdick's American Card Catalog and still known by that number today. They came in penny packs with a slab of gum, in yellow, blue and red wrappers.

The cards are undersized by modern standards, two and a half inches by three and an eighth. The fronts carry colour artwork by Fred Ray, who went on to draw the patriotic Superman covers of the war years. The backs carry the card number, a short story explaining the scene on the front, and an advertisement for the Supermen of America Club. Five wrappers and a dime got you a membership, and a choice of a badge or a ring.

One oddity nobody has explained satisfactorily: the copyright on the back reads Superman, Inc., not National Periodical Publications, which is what DC was called at the time.

The rubber band

Here is the mechanism behind most of the condition problem, and it is almost comically mundane.

Children kept their cards in bundles held together with a rubber band. The two cards on the outside of the bundle took all the pressure, all the dirt and all the handling. In a numbered set those two cards are the first and the last.

Which is exactly what the population reports show. Card #1, titled simply "Superman", and card #72, "Superman vs. Torpedo", are the two hardest in the set to find in high grade. Of twenty three submissions of #72, precisely one has graded PSA 7.

Dealers who handle this set are consistent about what the damage looks like. Nicked corners, rounded corners, general wear from being played with. Centering, which ruins so many vintage issues, is rarely the problem here.

Where a card sat on the sheet

The second mechanism is where the card was printed rather than how it was kept.

Card #72 sat on the bottom right edge of a 24-card sheet, which exposed it to cutting and handling damage before it ever reached a child. Card #66, "Danger at the Dam", sat second row, last on the right, and has produced two PSA 7s with nothing above them. Two cards, two edge positions, two populations that stop well short of the top.

There is also a print defect common to Gum Inc. issues of this period: a horizontal print line running through the card. It is not damage and it was never avoidable, and it caps the grade all the same.

The last twenty four are a different set

Cards #49 to #72 are short prints. They had a smaller run and a narrower distribution, probably in 1941 rather than 1940, and they are harder to find in any condition rather than merely in high grade.

That is the practical difference. A low number in rough shape turns up regularly. A high number in rough shape is a find. Collectors putting the set together generally report the last two dozen as the part that takes years.

The numbers

PSA has graded 8,830 cards from this set. Roughly 1,700 have come back PSA 6 or better. More than half of everything submitted grades PSA 5 or lower.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is a very unusual distribution. In most vintage sets the population report tapers toward the top. Here it collapses. There is no meaningful high-grade market at all, and a card that would be an ordinary example in a baseball set of the same decade is a condition rarity in this one.

It also explains why grade matters more here than almost anywhere else. A PSA 4 and a PSA 6 of the same card are not the same object at a different price. They are separated by most of the surviving population.

Two things everybody says that are not settled

First, the date. The cards say 1940. A great many sources say 1941. Both are probably right in part: the set was announced on the backs of the second series of 1940 Play Ball baseball cards and advertised in newspapers from early October 1940, while the high numbers appear to have been distributed the following year.

Second, and more interesting, the claim that these are Superman's first trading cards. Leader Novelty's Superman Candy and Surprise cards appear to have come first, and twelve of the images and stories in the Gum Inc. set were printed there before they were printed here. It is still the more important set, and the one collectors chase. First is a different claim from most important, and only the second one is safe.

Reprints

The complete set was reprinted in the 1980s, and a perforated reprint of card #12 appeared in a punch-out book in 1977.

Which produces the obvious trap. A pristine, cheap 1940 Superman card is not a bargain, it is a reprint, and the fact that high grades barely exist in the original is itself the best warning. If a card from this set looks like it was printed last week, it very nearly was.

This index tracks every card in the set in every grade, with what is listed and what has verifiably sold, and you can read how we work the numbers out.