The Martians Were the Line Topps Could Not Cross

Topps put out a card of a dog being vaporised by a ray gun, a woman on fire, and a giant insect eating a man. Parents lost their minds, a district attorney picked up the phone, and Mars Attacks was gone inside six months.

Here is the part that never gets mentioned. Topps had been doing exactly this for years and nobody had cared.

Earlier that same year, the same two men - Len Brown and Woody Gelman - had put out Civil War News. Paintings of Americans killing each other in close detail. Bayonets going in. Cannonballs taking heads off. Blood everywhere. It sold well and nobody complained.

"Topps had just as much gore in that set as they had in Mars Attacks," the collector Bernie Mertes has pointed out. "But because it was a historic thing, teachers and parents overlooked the gore and said, 'Oh this is historic. Kids are reading from these cards.'"

Some of the stories on the backs of those Civil War cards were made up. Didn't matter. It looked educational, so it was fine. Brown then made the same set with Martians in it and the roof came off.

We track 425 grade classes across this set, from card 1 down to the ones nobody talks about. Here is how a five month print run ended up with that many.

He Was Twenty Years Old

Len Brown started at Topps in October 1959, three weeks before his eighteenth birthday, working part time while going to night school. By 1962 he was a young product developer who had been staring at a Wally Wood cover for EC Comics' Weird Science #16 and thought there might be a card set in it.

He took it to Gelman and they built the story together. Mars sends saucers, burns the cities, then enlarges insects to five hundred times normal size and turns them loose. Earth counterattacks and destroys Mars. Brown wrote the text on the backs himself.

Wood did rough sketches, Bob Powell tightened them into pencils, and Norman Saunders - one of the great pulp illustrators of the century - painted the fifty-five finished pieces.

Topps kept its own name off it. The cards went out under Bubbles, Inc., a Topps front company, titled Attack from Space. Test packs sold five cards for a nickel and sold extremely well. Topps liked the numbers, renamed it Mars Attacks and shipped it wider.

Then the Letters Started

Complaints came from parents, from teachers and from the press. People burned alive. The dog getting zapped. A giant insect picking somebody apart. Card after card of women in states of distress that had plainly not been drawn with ten-year-olds in mind.

Paul Wolak was at a Catholic school in Chicago and remembers the nuns marching the entire school into the yard and lining them up in rows. Everyone knew what that meant.

Mertes was eight and had the sense to hide his from his mother. Most kids didn't. "Most people write to me and say, 'My mother threw my Mars Attacks cards away when she saw them,'" he has said.

Topps tried to compromise. Eleven of the worst cards went back to be redrawn and toned down, and the revised pencils were finished.

They never got printed. A district attorney in Connecticut opened an inquiry into the artwork, and Topps did the arithmetic - a niche card set on one side, the baseball card business on the other - and killed it outright. Not just the reprints. The whole series, everywhere.

Brown, asked years later how long it lasted: "about five or six months."

Three Things Everyone Gets Wrong

They are not rare. This is the big one. The story is so good that people assume the cards must be impossible to find, and they aren't. Plenty survived. A common in decent shape is a twenty or thirty dollar card. What is genuinely hard is high grade, because these were handled by children in 1962 and then shoved in drawers, and because the first and last cards in the set took the worst of it sitting on the outside of the stack.

There is no 56th card. For decades people chased a mythical card called "Earth's Retribution". An old Overstreet price guide even ran an ad offering to buy one. Brown settled it flatly: "I can assure you there were only 55 cards in the series. Back in those days all our cards were printed in increments of 11 because the printing sheet ran 11 cards across. So we wouldn't have had room to do a 56th card."

Eleven across the sheet. Which is also, neatly, exactly how many cards got pulled for redrawing.

It was never a national release. "I don't think the series was ever distributed nationally," Brown said, "which may be why it's so scarce. We never sold that much of it." Topps was a small company then and this was a regional set.

Watch What You Are Actually Buying

Because the original got killed, it has been reissued more often than almost anything else in the hobby, and several of those reissues will fool you in a photograph.

1964, A & BC Gum. Topps' British arm reprinted the set for the UK, where it caused its own row. These turn up constantly mislabelled as 1962 originals, and collectors find them actively annoying for exactly that reason.

1984, Renata Galasso. An authorised reprint of all 55 - which added a card numbered 56 showing the original wrapper, marked as a reprint. So one reason the 56th card myth will not die is that a card numbered 56 genuinely exists. It is just not from 1962.

1994, Mars Attacks Archives. Topps reprinted the set and finally published the eleven redrawn cards, thirty-two years after they were killed. If you want to see the toned-down 1962 that never shipped, that is where it lives.

After that came a book in 2012, then Invasion, Occupation, The Revenge and Uprising - new stories with new art, none of them the original.

The practical advice is boring and correct. Buy graded, or buy from someone who names the year and the printer in the listing rather than just saying "Mars Attacks". The cheap ones are cheap enough that there is no reason to gamble.

What It Turned Into

Tim Burton made the film in 1996 with Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan and Sarah Jessica Parker, which handed the whole thing to people who had never seen a card. Topps has been mining it ever since.

The joke is that the ban is why any of this happened. A set that ran its natural course in 1962 would be a curiosity now. A set yanked by a prosecutor after five months, with mothers binning them and nuns confiscating them in schoolyards, becomes a story - and the story is what people have been buying for sixty-four years.

Saunders' paintings would probably have earned it anyway. It didn't hurt.

All 425 classes we track from this set are in the index, with what is listed now and what has verifiably sold, and you can read how we work the numbers out.