The First Superman Cards Are Rarer Than the Famous Ones, and Worth a Fraction

Two different companies put Superman on cardboard in 1940. The one that went first made fewer cards, they are harder to find today, and they sell for a fraction of the set that came second.

I find this a useful case, because it separates two things that usually travel together. Being first is one kind of claim. Being the set the market decided to care about is another, and they do not have to land on the same product.

Leader Novelty went first, in the spring

The Leader Novelty Candy Company sold a one-cent toy box called Superman Candy and Surprise. The box itself was the card. You tore it along a perforation and you had a picture on one side and a Valuable Superman Premium Coupon on the other.

Save the coupons and you could send away for a Superman ring, a copy of the comic, membership of the Supermen of America club and a felt patch to go with it. The cards existed to shift candy and recruit club members, which is worth remembering when you look at how they were printed.

Thirty-six cards, catalogued R146. Two and three-eighths by three inches, so smaller than a standard card even by 1940 standards. And almost no colour: red highlights on a largely monochrome picture.

Gum Inc. followed in the autumn

Gum, Inc. of Philadelphia put out its Superman set later the same year, in penny packs with a slab of gum. Seventy-two cards, catalogued R145, two and a half by three and an eighth inches, full colour throughout, artwork by Fred Ray.

It was properly promoted, too. The set was announced on the backs of the second series of 1940 Play Ball baseball cards, with six different Superman Gum advertisements across the high numbers, and it ran ads in Superman #8 and Action Comics #32 that November.

Both sets did the same thing at the back end. Their final run got a shorter print: Leader's last twelve cards, and Gum Inc's last twenty-four, which were distributed into 1941.

The overlap that settles the order

Here is the detail that makes the sequence checkable rather than a matter of comparing advertising dates.

Twelve of the images and stories in the Gum Inc. set were printed by Leader Novelty first. Leader's cards 25 to 36 carry art and text that turn up again in the Gum Inc. series.

The neatest example is Leader #33, which is the same picture and the same words as Gum Inc. #1. That is the card whose story text contains the first appearance of Kal-el as a spelling, and collectors chase the Gum Inc. version of it specifically for that reason.

It appeared on a candy box first.

So why is the first set the cheap one

Three reasons, and none of them is scarcity.

It does not look like much. Set a Leader card beside a Gum Inc. card and the comparison is unkind. One is a small, mostly two-colour panel torn off a sweet box. The other is a full-colour comic scene with a white border and a proper printed back.

It was never really a card. A Leader card is packaging that detaches. Children kept the ring and posted the coupon; the box was the thing you tore up to get at the sweets.

And the reputation went to the other one. Gum Inc. gets called Superman's first set constantly, including by people who know better, because it is the one with the checklist, the wrappers, the registry sets and the auction records. Being described as first for eighty years is its own kind of asset.

How much harder is it, really

One data point I liked, from a collector on the vintage non-sports forum. He finished the 72-card Gum Inc. set in about a year. After roughly the same stretch of time he was not quite halfway through the 36-card Leader set.

Half the checklist, several times the difficulty. He also said the hard part was not finding them but finding them in any decent condition, which follows from what they are. A card that spent its life as the outside of a candy box does not survive well.

The empty box

My favourite fact in this story, and it makes the point better than any price comparison.

In October 2024 an empty Leader Novelty counter display box sold for $10,200. Not the cards. The box the boxes came in, with nothing inside it, which once held 72 one-cent boxes of Superman candy.

That is more than most individual Leader cards will make, and it tells you where the value in this issue actually sits: in the packaging, the story and the survival, rather than in the picture.

And the Gum Inc. numbers for comparison

A Gum Inc. #1 in PSA 5 sold for $13,800 at REA in 2021.

A PSA 6.5 of the same card was bid to $36,250 at Heritage, and that figure gets quoted as a record. It should not be. The lot went unpaid and the card did not sell. A bid nobody honours is not a price, and this index does not treat it as one.

What I take from it

Chronology and value are different questions, and the hobby answers the second one far more decisively than the first.

Leader Novelty has the better claim to being first, the smaller print run, the harder completion and the scarcer survivors. Gum Inc. has the colour, the checklist, the promotion and eighty years of being called the first Superman set. The market has priced the second list far above the first, and that is not obviously wrong, because a card is worth what somebody will pay rather than what it can prove about dates.

It is worth knowing which one you are buying, though. If you want the first Superman cards, they are R146, and they are not the ones in the price guides.

This index tracks every card in the 1940 Gum Inc. set in every grade, with what is listed and what has verifiably sold, and you can read how we work the numbers out.

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