The 1962 Set Mothers Threw Away and Children Hid

Most write-ups of the 1962 Mars Attacks set explain its scarcity by pointing at the prosecutor who shut it down. That is real and we have written about it separately. But it is not the whole story, and arguably not the larger half.

The larger half is that the set was destroyed by the people who bought it.

What the cards actually showed

You need the artwork in mind for the rest of this to make sense.

Fifty-five cards telling a continuous story of a Martian invasion. Cities burning. People being disintegrated. A dog being shot with a ray gun. Giant insects released on a defenceless population. The final paintings were by Norman Saunders, working from Wally Wood's layouts and Bob Powell's pencils, and they are very good, which is precisely the problem.

This was not cartoon violence. It was carefully rendered gouache painting of burning flesh, sold to eight-year-olds for a nickel a pack.

The mothers

The most common story anyone who collects this set will tell you is not about a prosecutor. It is about a parent finding the cards.

Bernie Mertes, who has spent decades documenting the set, put it plainly: most people who write to him say their mother threw the cards away when she saw them. Another long-time collector described the same thing from the other side, the standard reaction being a demand to know where on earth the child had bought them.

There is a story from a Catholic school in Chicago about pupils being marched into the yard and lined up in rows, which everybody present understood to mean trouble.

So picture what that does to a print run. The cards were sold in 1962. A meaningful share of them were in a bin within weeks of leaving the shop, destroyed not by time or handling but deliberately, by an adult who had looked at them and decided they should not exist.

The children who saw it coming

And here is the detail I like most in this whole story.

Mertes was eight years old when the set came out, and he had the foresight to hide his cards from his mother.

Eight, and already running a risk assessment. He is one of the reasons a complete high-grade run exists at all, and the point generalises: the 1962 Mars Attacks cards that survive in good condition are disproportionately the ones that were successfully concealed.

That is an unusual survivorship filter. Most vintage sets were thinned by ordinary indifference, by bicycle spokes and shoeboxes and house moves. This one was thinned by a specific adult decision, and what escaped did so because a child anticipated that decision and acted.

Why the ban makes the survivorship worse

The two causes compound rather than sitting side by side.

When Topps halted the set it did not simply stop printing. It cancelled distribution nationwide, so the cards reached shops regionally and briefly. There was no long tail of unsold stock sitting in a warehouse to be rediscovered later, which is what has rescued plenty of other short-lived sets.

The scale of that shows up in one figure: only two sealed packs are known in PSA's census. For a set that sold well enough to be expanded from a test market, that is close to nothing.

So the supply is small, and the surviving portion of it skews heavily toward cards that were handled by children and then hidden, which is not a recipe for high grades.

What to check before you buy

Two things, and the second catches people constantly.

The backs tell you the year. A genuine 1962 card has a pink back carrying a preview of the next card in the story. Later reprints have red and white backs. If the back is not pink, it is not a 1962 card, whatever the seller has written in the title.

And the English reissue is a separate thing entirely. A&BC put the set out in the UK in 1964, where it caused much the same trouble. Those cards look very like the originals and are worth a fraction of them, and collectors of this set treat the resemblance as a genuine nuisance rather than a curiosity. This index files the A&BC printing as its own issue for that reason.

The thing worth sitting with

A set that was pulled by a prosecutor is a good story, and it is the one that gets told.

But the cards that are hardest to find today are not scarce because of a legal inquiry in Connecticut. They are scarce because tens of thousands of them were bought by children, taken home, seen by an adult, and thrown out on the spot.

The set was killed twice. Once commercially, in an office. And once domestically, in kitchens across the country, one packet at a time.

This index tracks every card in the 1962 Mars Attacks set in every grade, including the A&BC printing filed separately, with what is listed and what has verifiably sold. If you want the earlier piece on why Topps stopped printing, it is here, and there is a companion piece on a 1940 set with the same survivorship problem.

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