The Card Children Were Told to Write On: Why the Mars Attacks Checklist Is Hard to Find Clean

The last card in the 1962 Mars Attacks set is not a Martian. Card 55 is the checklist: a list of all 55 titles with a little box beside each one. It was printed to be marked, and children did what it asked. Today the checklist is not especially hard to find. A clean one is.

A checklist on every card, then on one

The checklist is older than the bubble gum card. In the 1880s many Allen & Ginter series carried the whole list on the back of every card. A smoker holding any card from the series could see what else there was to collect, and no single card had to do the job.

In 1962 Topps put the list on a card of its own, which left every other back free for the story. In Mars Attacks each back previewed what happened next, which we described in the set mothers threw away and children hid. The list went on card 55.

That one decision made card 55 different from the other 54. Every other card was meant to be looked at. The checklist was meant to be written on.

Not rare, just used

When we checked this index's Mars Attacks listings, card 55 turned up about as often as an ordinary card in the set, if anything a little more often, and more often than card 1. Topps printed it like any other card, and plenty of them survived.

The difference is in what shape they survived in. Roughly three quarters of the card 55 copies we saw offered were ungraded, against about half for the rest of the set. Only a handful of graded copies appeared, most of them in low grades. A card that has been ticked, crossed or initialled is often not worth grading, so it tends to stay in the raw pile.

Card 55 also had a second problem. As the last card in the set, it was one end of the stack. We found that card 1 in every set this index covers grades worse than the rest, and Mars Attacks card 1 averages a PSA grade near 3, against about 5.5 for the rest of the set. Guides to the set say the last card took the same kind of handling and wear, before anyone picked up a pencil.

What a mark does to a grade

PSA has a qualifier for exactly this. A card with pen or pencil writing on it is graded on its condition as if the writing were not there, and then given the letters MK. Collectors commonly treat a qualified card as worth about two full grades less than its number suggests.

On a checklist that rule of thumb is generous. A tick in one box is a mark. Ticks in all 55 are a card that has been used for its purpose, and many buyers simply will not take one. When we checked, none of the card 55 copies on offer carried the MK label, which suggests marked checklists are rarely sent for grading in the first place.

What a clean one costs

Here are the ratios from this index, comparing card 55 with the median ordinary card (cards 2 to 54) in the same condition.

Ungraded, on offer: card 55 asked about four times as much as an ordinary card. Card 1 asked about six times.

Recorded sales: in the grades where card 55 sold, it brought roughly two to four times an ordinary card. A PSA 2 sold for about four times the median ordinary PSA 2, an ungraded copy for a little over twice, and a TAG-graded copy for about three and a half times.

High grade: unmarked copies in the upper grades are so rarely offered that we cannot measure them properly. When one does appear, it is priced far above anything else in the set.

These rest on small numbers of card 55 copies, a handful of sales and a couple of dozen listings, so treat them as a direction rather than a price list. The direction is consistent: even well-worn, the checklist costs several times an ordinary card, and the cleaner it gets, the wider the gap.

What to check before buying one

Look at every box. A single faint pencil tick can be easy to miss in a photograph. Ask for a straight, well-lit scan of the front, or look at the card under a lamp at an angle, where pencil shows.

Watch for erasing. A checklist that was ticked in pencil and later rubbed out may look clean in a photo and show a scuffed, thinned surface in hand, and a grader will see it.

Read the label. A PSA grade with MK after it is a marked card, whatever the number says. Some sellers lead with the number.

Expect wear on top of the marks. As the last card in the set, 55 took the edge and corner wear that came with being at the end of the pile. A clean, unmarked copy with sharp corners is the exception twice over.

Price it against the set, not on its own. The useful question is not what card 55 costs but how many ordinary cards in the same grade it costs. On this index the answer is usually several.

The thing worth sitting with

Most damage to old cards was an accident: a rubber band, a pocket, a spill. The checklist is the one card that was damaged because a child used it exactly as Topps intended.

That is why a clean card 55 carries a premium even though Topps made as many of them as any other card. The scarce thing is not the card. It is the child who looked at the boxes and decided not to tick them.

This index tracks the 1962 Mars Attacks set card by card and grade by grade. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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