He Was Paid $50 a Painting. One of Them Sold for $48,000.

Two of the sets this index tracks were painted by the same man. He was not famous, he was not credited on the cards, and he was paid by the picture.

Norman Saunders painted the whole of Mars Attacks and, working from Bob Powell's pencils, the first three of the five 1966 Batman series. If you collect vintage non-sport cards you have been looking at his work for years without necessarily knowing his name.

Four thousand illustrations

Norman Blaine Saunders was born in Minot, North Dakota on New Year's Day 1907 and trained at the Grand Central School of Art. He sometimes signed work with his middle name, Blaine.

Before he ever painted a trading card he had spent three decades on newsstands. Pulp magazine covers, paperbacks, men's adventure titles, comic books. The lurid, high-contrast, slightly frantic style that makes Mars Attacks look the way it does was developed selling magazines to people walking past a rack.

He published something over four thousand illustrations in his career, which is a scarcely believable figure for any artist.

He started at Topps as a retoucher

The first job is the detail I like most, because it is so unglamorous.

In 1958 Topps hired him to paint over photographs of baseball players who had been traded, so they would appear to be wearing the uniform of their new club. Not original art. Correcting other people's photographs so a card could go out on time.

From there Topps found other uses for him, and over the following twenty-two years he painted a remarkable share of what the company produced when it needed pictures rather than photographs.

What he painted

Mars Attacks, 1962. The entire set. The burning cities, the disintegrations, the dog being shot with a ray gun. We have written about what happened to those cards, and the reason they caused so much trouble is that the paintings are very good. Cartoon violence does not upset anybody. Carefully rendered gouache does.

1966 Batman, the first three series. Bob Powell pencilled and Saunders painted, the same partnership as Mars Attacks. Black Bat, Red Bat and Blue Bat are his; Riddler Back and Bat Laffs switched to photographs from the film, which is exactly when the quality is generally agreed to have fallen away.

Civil War News, 1962. Just as bloody as Mars Attacks and it caused no trouble at all, because it was history and therefore educational.

Wacky Packages, and here the numbers become extraordinary. By the sixteenth series he had painted 478 of the 503 Wacky Packages. Ninety-five per cent of a line that became Topps' best-selling product, outselling the company's sports cards.

And a long tail besides: Ugly Stickers with Wally Wood, 1957 Space Cards, Nutty Initials, Weird Wheels.

The arithmetic

Now the part that is hard to read.

For the last batch of Wacky Packages, after those sales had made Topps a great deal of money, he was given a flat fee of fifty dollars per painting. The account of his career published by his own collectors' community puts it plainly: having made Topps millions, they finally agreed to pay him more than minimum wage.

Topps kept the paintings.

In 2018 the original artwork for Mars Attacks card number two, Martians Approaching, sold at auction for forty-eight thousand dollars including the buyer's premium. It measures five and a quarter inches by three and a half.

Others from the same body of work: Civil War News originals at $5,400 and $4,800, 1957 Space Cards paintings at $1,920 each, and 1966 Batman paintings, three and a half by four and three-quarter inches on Bristol board, ranging from about $1,550 to $2,630 when four came up together in 2016.

He did not own any of them.

The last set

In 1980 Topps asked him to paint a series called Weird Wheels. He was seventy-three and in failing health, and he took the job against his doctor's advice.

When his son questioned the sense of risking his health for low-paying work, his answer was "I gotta keep working. What the hell else am I gonna do?"

It was his last set. He lived until 1989 and saw the beginnings of the appreciation that has since made his originals worth what they are.

Why this matters to a card collector

Three practical things follow from it.

The art explains the condition problem. Saunders painted in gouache at close to card size, in dense saturated colour. Reproducing that meant heavy ink coverage, and heavy ink coverage on 1960s card stock is what chips, cracks and shows every handling mark. The reason his sets are hard to find clean is partly that they were beautiful.

It explains why some series are better than others. The consensus that the 1966 Batman sets declined across the year is not nostalgia. Three of them are original paintings by a career illustrator and two of them are film stills. That is a real difference in what you are buying.

And the originals are a separate market entirely. A Mars Attacks card in high grade is a serious purchase. The painting it was made from is a different order of thing, and there is exactly one of each.

The thing worth sitting with

A man painted more than four thousand pictures, including nearly every Wacky Package and the whole of Mars Attacks, was paid by the piece, kept none of it, and went back to work at seventy-three because he could not think what else to do.

The cards this index tracks are reproductions of his work, printed in the millions, and it is the reproductions most people will ever own.

That was rather the point of them.

This index tracks the 1962 Mars Attacks set and all five 1966 Batman issues, card by card and grade by grade. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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