The Scarcest Cards in the 1940 Superman Set Are Also the Best Preserved

Cards 49 to 72 of the 1940 Gum Inc. Superman set are the short prints. They are the hard ones, the expensive ones, the reason a complete set is a serious undertaking. They also grade better than the common cards, and the gap is not small.

On this index, the average PSA grade of the low numbers is 4.81 and the average of the high numbers is 5.87. Scarcer cards, in better condition. That is worth explaining, because it runs against how people usually assume scarcity works.

What the set actually is

Seventy-two cards, issued by Gum Inc. of Philadelphia, catalogued R145 in the American Card Catalog. Full-colour drawings of Superman rescuing people, with the story on the back alongside an advertisement for the Supermen of America Club. They are Superman's first trading cards, or close to it, and Gum Inc. went on to become Bowman.

The part that matters here is that the set was not issued all at once. Cards 1 to 48 appeared in the autumn of 1940. Cards 49 to 72 had a shorter print run and limited distribution the following year, which is why some catalogues list the issue as 1941 rather than 1940 and why this index files the whole run under one franchise regardless of which year a seller writes in the title.

Why the scarce ones survived better

The explanation is about who ended up holding them.

A card printed in quantity and sold everywhere in 1940 went to children, in bulk, at the height of the character's popularity. It was sorted, stacked, banded, carried and traded. That is the population that produces a 4.81 average.

A card with a short run and limited distribution in 1941 reached fewer shops and fewer hands. A larger share of what exists came through adults, dealers and people who were already treating them as something to keep rather than something to play with.

So the two effects that usually move together pull apart here. Fewer were printed, and a higher proportion of those few were looked after. The high numbers are harder to find and easier to find clean.

Card number one is the exception

One card breaks the pattern in the other direction, and it is exactly the card you would predict.

Card #1, simply titled Superman, averages 4.13 on this index. That is below the low-number average of 4.81 and well below the high numbers at 5.87. It is the worst-preserved card in the set among those we track with enough examples to say anything.

PSA's own account of the set explains why in the same terms this index keeps arriving at: cards #1 and #72 often fell victim to rubber band damage and handling wear from youngsters.

We wrote about that mechanism across four different sets, and the 1940 Superman #1 is a textbook case. It is the most wanted card in the set, it sat on the outside of every stack, and it is the least likely to have survived in good order.

Where our data does not support the usual claim

An honest note, because this is the sort of thing that gets repeated without checking.

The standard account holds that card #72, Superman vs. Torpedo, is the other condition rarity, and attributes it partly to sheet position: it sat on the bottom right edge of a 24-card printing sheet, which is a vulnerable place to be.

That is plausible and it may well be true. But this index does not see it. Card #72 averages 5.67 here, above the set's low-number average and roughly in line with its high-number neighbours. Card #65 averages 6.20, the best figure in the group, despite also being listed among the elusive ones.

Two possible readings, and we cannot separate them. Our sample for those cards is small, three classes for #72 and five for #65, which is thin enough that a couple of good copies move the average a long way. Or the sheet-position effect is real for top-grade examples specifically and does not show up in an average that includes everything.

Either way, we are not going to assert a mechanism our own figures do not show. The rubber-band effect on card #1 is visible in the data. The sheet-position effect on card #72 is not.

What this means if you are collecting the set

Three practical points.

Budget for availability, not condition, on the high numbers. The difficulty with cards 49 to 72 is finding them at all. When one appears it is more likely to be presentable than a random low number would be.

Budget for condition on card #1. The opposite problem. It turns up regularly and most of what turns up is rough. A clean one is a genuinely different proposition from a clean #24.

And check the year in the listing carefully. Because the high numbers shipped in 1941, sellers describe the same set as 1940 or 1941 more or less at random, and some databases catalogue it as 1941. This index treats them as one issue, which is what they are.

The thing worth sitting with

We keep finding that condition scarcity and print scarcity are different things that happen to arrive at the same word. This set separates them cleanly.

The rarest cards in it are in the best shape, because scarcity kept them away from children. The commonest card in it is the most damaged, because popularity handed it to every child in America and then asked them to hold onto it with a rubber band.

This index tracks the full 1940 Gum Inc. Superman set card by card and grade by grade. There is also a companion piece on the other 1940 Superman set most people have never heard of. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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