Topps Made Five Batman Sets in One Year and Ran Out of Ideas

Five Batman sets in a single year. Not five series of one set, five separate issues, each with its own checklist and its own back design. Reading them in order tells you exactly how long a craze lasts and what a card company does while it is running out.

The show landed in January 1966 and was an immediate phenomenon. Topps responded the way Topps did, which was to print as much Batman as it could get out of the door, and then to keep printing after the audience had moved on.

Set one: the good one

Black Bat. 55 cards, named for the black bat silhouette holding the caption on the front.

This is the set Topps took its time with. The fronts are original paintings by Norman Saunders, the pulp illustrator who had painted Mars Attacks four years earlier, and the backs carry a written description of the scene alongside a cartoon of Batman running toward the reader.

It is organised properly, too, in villain subsets: the Joker on cards 3 to 13, the Penguin 14 to 24, Catwoman 25 to 35, the Riddler 36 to 46, with the last nine standing alone. Cards 1 and 2, Batman and Robin, are the ones everybody wants, and we have written about why separately.

Collectors are near-unanimous that this is the best of the five, and that the quality fell with each one after it.

Set two: fewer cards, and the backs become a puzzle

Red Bat, sometimes called the A Series. 44 cards, down eleven from the first.

The fronts are nearly identical in style, still Saunders, with the bat holding the caption now in red and a thin red frame around the image. The change is on the back, and it is the first sign of a company looking for a reason to keep buying.

The written stories are gone. Instead each back is a jigsaw puzzle piece. A complete set assembles into ten-piece puzzles of Batman and Robin and six-piece puzzles of the Joker, the Riddler, Catwoman and the Penguin.

That is a cheaper back to produce than 44 pieces of original prose, and it gives a child a reason to want the whole set rather than the cards they like.

Set three: both, because neither was enough

Blue Bat, the B Series. 44 cards again.

Still Saunders on the front. On the back, both approaches at once: some puzzle pieces, some descriptions. The set is generally regarded as the weakest of the three painted issues, and the phrase collectors use for where it sits against the first two is not flattering.

Three sets in, Topps had commissioned well over a hundred original paintings from one illustrator in a matter of months. That was the point at which something had to give.

Set four: the paintings stop

Riddler Back. 38 cards, the smallest of the five, and the first with no Saunders artwork at all.

The fronts are photographs from the 1966 Batman film rather than paintings, which shows you what changed: production stills already existed and cost nothing to license from a picture you were already tied to. New paintings had to be commissioned, sketched, approved and delivered.

The film material is genuinely good, mind. It has the gadgetry the television budget could not afford, so the Dynamic Duo appear on a boat, a helicopter and a motorcycle. Card 20 is the shark repellent scene, which is the most famous single card in any of the five sets.

And the gimmick escalates again. The backs are black with white text, the card number sits inside a white bat, and at the bottom is a Riddler's Riddle that cannot be read without a plastic decoder. There was one in every pack.

A note for anyone buying: those black borders are fragile. Black edges show every knock, which is why high-grade Riddler Backs are harder than the card counts suggest.

Set five: the one nobody wanted

Bat Laffs, also called Color Photos. 55 cards, more film stills, thin white borders, and backs that are puzzle pieces with a joke printed on them.

By this point the formula is exhausted and the set shows it. Puzzles had been used twice, photographs once, and the new idea was captions.

There is a production detail worth knowing, and it is the same sheet arithmetic that shaped other sets of the era. Bat Laffs was printed on 132-card sheets for a 55-card checklist, so 22 cards were overprinted to fill the space, generally held to be numbers 34 through 55.

And yet it is broadly agreed to be the scarcest of the five, because the print run itself was small. The explanation collectors offer is straightforward: it was the fifth Batman set of the year, and people were simply tired of collecting the Caped Crusader.

What the sequence actually shows

Read the five in order and the story is not really about Batman.

The card counts fall and then jump. 55, 44, 44, 38, 55. The last figure is not a recovery, it is a cheaper set padded back to a round number with photographs.

The art gets replaced. Three sets of commissioned paintings, then two sets of pictures that already existed. That is what a deadline does.

And the backs work harder every time. Stories, then puzzles, then puzzles and descriptions, then a riddle needing a decoder, then puzzles and jokes. Each set needed a reason to exist that the previous one had used up.

What this means if you collect them

Three practical points.

Know which set you are looking at before you look at a price. A card numbered 1 exists in several of these issues and they are not remotely comparable. The bat logo colour on the front is the fastest tell, and the back settles it.

The scarcest is not the most expensive. Bat Laffs was printed least and sells for least, because scarcity without demand is just scarcity. That is the same lesson as the two 1940 Superman sets.

And the English and Canadian printings are separate things. A&BC produced these in Britain on slightly smaller card stock, and the Dutch edition of Riddler Back replaced the plastic decoder with a waxy panel you scratched with a coin. Those are their own issues with their own prices, and this index files them separately for that reason.

This index tracks all five 1966 Batman sets card by card and grade by grade, including the A&BC and O-Pee-Chee printings, with what is listed and what has verifiably sold. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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