Of the Golden Gate Bridge, Brown notes, “We tried to pick the most iconic landmarks that kids would recognize.” He and Gelman felt that showing familiar locations would give the series greater impact and make the destruction feel more real.
Brown, Gelman, Powell, and Saunders all worked together on the earlier Civil War News card set that influenced the look and feel of Mars Attacks. Civil War’s bloody tone was itself inspired by the Horrors of War card set released by Gum, Inc., in 1938.
Gelman, a former animator, comic book writer, and co-creator of Topps’s own Bazooka Joe comics, was an accomplished cartoonist and often developed the card concepts with Brown. Gelman storyboarded many scenes himself before handing them to series penciler Bob Powell for embellishment.
“Woody Gelman’s theory was that every card should look like either a pulp cover or a movie poster or a paperback jacket—the viewer should have an ‘Oh my gosh!’ reaction when they see it. He really wanted each card to tell a story.”
The horizontal structure of the art in Mars Attacks and other early Topps series was an attempt to capture the feel of CinemaScope wide-screen movies. Years later, Topps would release a series of “Widevision” Mars Attacks trading cards based on the 1996 feature film.
A similar scene to this is shown in one of Wally Wood’s development sketches (this page). Brown says, “Topps unfortunately felt that showing skeletons was too gruesome for kids, but I always thought the look of terror on the man’s face here was much more horrifying.”
“Woody came up with this scene. He said, ‘Let’s have them drinking martinis like they’re toasting their victory.’ I remember saying to Woody, ‘Should it look like an Earth martini glass or should it be something a little weirder?’ We ended up going with a regular martini glass so it would be more recognizable.”
The original test run was called Attack from Space (only a handful of these sets was produced), but the title changed when the set was released officially. Recalls Brown, “We thought the fewer words of Mars Attacks would look bolder on the wrapper, like more of a headline.”
“We were planning the next card set to follow Civil War News, and science fiction was the obvious choice. We thought about a time travel series, but we didn’t know if we could come up with enough scenarios.” Inspired by H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, Brown and Gelman eventually settled on a more basic concept: an alien invasion.
Brown recalls that the set’s release in the United Kingdom caused controversy. “They were incensed. We heard from our English subsidiary that a speaker in Parliament brought up this card, about how awful it was, from a British point of view, that we were selling cards like this to children in our country.”
The “Beauty” in this card was originally painted by Saunders wearing a small, revealing nightie. Feeling the art was too sexual for the kids they’d be selling to, management at Topps insisted the women be covered. “Norm painted great flesh. There was a lot of skin and cleavage showing. I was sorry we had to change this one.”
“We didn’t really discuss whether the Martians were any certain height,” says Brown. Despite being portrayed in the Tim Burton film as small, impish aliens, the Martians were never thought of that way during development of the card series. “I think the idea was they were human sized.”
“We were optimistic when we tested the series as Attack from Space, but I don’t think we shipped all that many sets with that title. We would typically do a test run of maybe four or five cases and get it into a dozen or so local stores and monitor the sales.”
In-house Topps staff, including Jane Fitzsimmons, were responsible for packaging and other illustrations, including the original wrapper and display box. Foreign editions used different wraps produced independently from Topps in the United States.
“We could show skeletons of dead human beings or people in flames, but we couldn’t show the rounded, pretty flesh of a woman’s shoulder—we had to paint over the original artwork after Topps objected. In this card, we had to cover the woman right up to her neck!”
“It was pure inhumanity,” Brown recollects. “The saucers are striking the Earth, and here they are burning the cattle up and just destroying whatever they can.” This scene was directly translated to the screen by Tim Burton in his 1996 film.
“What other ways could they torture humans? What else could they do? First they burn them, so now let’s freeze them.” Conceptualizing the various Martian weapons and powers was a process Brown enjoyed. “Imagine spending time talking about these things!”
Many of the concepts in Mars Attacks were taken from popular science-fiction, horror, and pulp trends of the day. “The Incredible Shrinking Man [1957] was a movie I loved. This scene contains one of the many elements Woody and I would talk about.”
“I remember being unhappy when we put these captions on the front of the cards. When we were planning the series, and as the paintings were coming in, we didn’t realize that’s what we were going to do: take about a quarter of an inch of finished art and cover it. I always felt bad about that.”
Bob Powell, in addition to producing roughs for most of Topps’s nonsports cards in the 1960s—including Civil War News and Batman—also contributed drawings of ball players that were printed on the backs of their annual baseball card sets.
“Giant insects were one of the weapons that the Martians used against Earth. We wanted visual elements that were popular in science-fiction movies.” Films like Them (1954) and Tarantula (1955) inspired the use of enormous bugs.
“I credit Bob Powell for these insects,” Brown states. “Norm had the freedom to change things if he thought they didn’t look right—because Norm was so good—but Bob Powell did pretty tight pencils.”
After publication, many of the original paintings were altered by the artists. These images were reportedly changed at the request of Topps, who briefly considered re-releasing the series with less offensive imagery (see this page for Rosem Enterprises’ Mars Attacks—The Unpublished Version).
“I know I came up with this one,” Brown says. “This was almost a cliché in horror magazines, but it must have made a big impact on me in my younger days, because I really wanted to get that image in the series once we were doing insects as part of the invasion.” Wally Wood storyboarded an early version of this concept, shown on this page.
Len Brown and Wally Wood would team up again in the mid-1960s to create the super-hero comic book T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Wood named lead character Dynamo’s alter ego Leonard Brown, after his friend and co-writer. The characters have been revived several times over the years, most recently by DC Comics in 2010.
Recalling the inspiration for the Martians’ mechanical monstrosities, Brown says, “I go back to the movie serial The Phantom Empire [1935], with Gene Autry, and another called Undersea Kingdom [1936]. They both used very similar, very clunky 1930s-style robots.”
Controversy erupted when upset parents, teachers, and lawmakers voiced disapproval over the violent and salacious imagery used on the cards. “At the time,” Brown says, “we actually kept a file of all the complaints we received.”
Brown and Gelman were surprised by the uproar over the series content. “Our Civil War set was just as gory as Mars Attacks. I suspect because it was historical, people just felt that kids were learning, so the violence was okay.”
Following the initial release of Mars Attacks in 1962, the card set brought more backlash and controversy than sales, so Topps chose not to distribute the series nationally. Despite its fame today, the original set was never widely available, and very few were produced.
Perhaps controversy did not come as a complete surprise to Topps management, who weren’t thrilled with their first look at the finished product. “They didn’t like what they were seeing, and we were told to do a lot of retouching. This original painting showed the dog’s skeleton. Norm had to go back and paint the fur on.”
Because of their uneasiness over the material, Topps decided to release the seri
es under the copyright “Bubbles Inc.” rather than Topps, a practice begun in 1956 when they produced a trading card series based around then-controversial rocker Elvis Presley.
“One fellow who worked in our department told us, ‘I think you got it all wrong—this is a worldwide invasion. All the cards should depict famous places!’ By showing how individuals on the street were dealing with this, with just one or two people fighting a Martian or a monster, he thought we weren’t showing the larger calamity. We were making it too small.”
Brown and Gelman agreed that the series shouldn’t show only large-scale destruction. “I think we did right by including both, how the common man—or woman, in a lot of cases—was menaced by the Martians. It didn’t always have to be the Martians destroying the White House or the Golden Gate Bridge,” says Brown, before adding, “but Mount Rushmore would have been neat.”
“I recall seeing a horror movie from the 1950s—I believe it was War of the Colossal Beast [1958]—which showed a sixty-foot-tall creature being electrocuted by high-voltage power lines. That scene inspired this card. If you look close, you can see a man falling from the tower. I have no idea what he was doing up there, however!”
Brown wrote the copy on the back of the cards for the entire series. “I had a lot of fun writing them. Even though I was causing myself trouble, I was for more copy because I was a big reader. They could have given me eight lines of copy in larger type, but I wanted more for the kids to read.”
“I got away with a lot back in those days,” Brown says. “I don’t think management even bothered to read the backs. They were very worried about the artwork being offensive, but they let me write about any gruesome thing I wanted!”
Brown recalls that, when writing copy, “I’d have all the original paintings on my desk, going through them and writing about what I saw. It didn’t take that long, because Woody and I had talked out each scenario beforehand, so I already had a lot of our little thoughts about what to say in mind before I started to write.”
“I did one and a half cards a day for Topps doing Mars Attacks,” said Norm Saunders in a 1981 interview. Like most card and comics companies of the time, Topps retained the original paintings and eventually sold them off in the 1970s. “Of course, nobody knew the true value or historical significance of the art back then,” says Brown.
In recent years, a handful of original art from the series has surfaced, commanding high prices. In 2007, the original art for “The Invasion Begins” (card no. 1) sold at auction for over $80,000.
Despite its short print run, the series made an indelible impression on youngsters. In the years following its release, individual cards could sometimes still be found in penny vending machines.
The card art from the original 1962 series that appears in this volume was taken directly from the original transparencies, which still survive. The card backs were scanned from an archived set that had been kept in storage at Topps since its initial release.
By the mid-1980s, Mars Attacks had achieved full-blown cult status, and other companies were seeking to capitalize on the phenomenon by releasing unauthorized products. Topps considered reprinting the series, and even commissioned eleven new cards, but their plans did not see fruition until 1994 (see this page).
Spurred by the newfound popularity of Mars Attacks, in 1987 Topps editor Gary Gerani created a spiritual successor to the series titled Dinosaurs Attack. Similar to its predecessor, Dinosaurs Attack only gained notoriety years after its original release.
This card shares its name with a card in the previous Topps series, Civil War News (see this page). Despite having used the same creative team for both series, Brown insists this was just a coincidence.
Over the years, Mars Attacks cards have skyrocketed in value. While they originally sold for just five cents a pack, single cards in high-grade condition can command hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
Card no. 1, “The Invasion Begins,” is the rarest to find in high-grade condition. In addition to it being one of the most iconic images in the series, it is also hard to find in good condition, since card sets tended to be stacked sequentially, and the top card was most susceptible to wear and damage.
Norm Saunders painted a trilogy of war card series for Topps: Civil War News, Mars Attacks, and Battle (about World War II). He also contributed to such other great series as Ugly Stickers in 1965, Batman in 1966, and Wacky Packages, starting in 1967. A prolific commercial artist who painted more pulp covers than anybody else (“one hundred or more a year for twenty years, starting in 1935,” he told The Wrapper magazine in 1981), Saunders died on March 7, 1989, at the age of eighty-two.
The destruction of Mars was an afterthought—but perhaps a foregone conclusion. “In those days, there was no thought of creating a sequel or a second card set, so we had no problem destroying every last Martian.”
The images shown on pages this page and this page are no illusion. Loaned to Topps by a collector for this book, what you see is the only known sealed pack of Mars Attacks trading cards to have surfaced.
Zina Saunders
In 1994, two years before the Tim Burton/Warner Bros. movie, Topps released a second series of Mars Attacks cards. Officially titled Mars Attacks Archives, the set consisted of a reprint of the classic fifty-five-card series from 1962, as well as eleven paintings by Herb Trimpe and Earl Norem (cards 56–66 starting on this page), which were commissioned in 1989, based on unused concepts from Bob Powell and Wally Wood. Card copy was by Len Brown, who had also written the backs for the original 1962 series.
By 1994, Topps was producing their own comic books as well as a variety of painted trading cards, and pulled together from their stable of artists a new thirty-two-card subset titled Visions: New and Original (starting on this page)
Previous and below: Keith Giffen
Ken Steacy
Ted Boonthanakit
Ted Boonthanakit
Earl Norem
Earl Norem
Drew Friedman
Zina Saunders
John Pound
Charlie Adlard
Kevin Altieri
Simon Bisley
John Bolton
Frank Brunner
Mark Chiarello
Joe Ciardiello
Geof Darrow
Ricardo Delgado
Steve Fastner and Rich Larsen
Keith Giffen
Sam Kieth
Miran Kim
Michael Ploog
John Rheaume
Zina Saunders
Mark Schultz
Joe Smith
Ken Steacy
William Stout
Timothy Truman
John Van Fleet
Norm Saunders
Over the years, a variety of Mars Attacks cards have been produced by Topps for a number of different companies. Above is a card from Non-Sport Update (July–August 1994), illustrated by Garbage Pail Kids artist Jay Lynch. Exclusive tie-in cards from Screamin’ Products models, Pocket Comics, and others are collected here for the first time (this page).
“Air Assault Martian” by Rob Robison. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
“Slaughter in the Streets” by Chris Ryan. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
“Terror in the Sky” by Ed Repka. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
“The Invasion Begins” by Ed Repka. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
“Mars Attacks Modeling” by John G. Gernon. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
“Attacking Martian” by Steve Bissette. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
“No Place to Hide” by Jim Groman. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
“Target Earth” by Cathy Diefendorf. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
“Contemplating Conquest” by Jim Elliot. Screamin’ Products model, 1995.
Exclusive trading cards by Gus LaMonica for Pocket Comics, 1988. Fifty-four were planned, but the series was canceled after four issues.
Promo cards designed
by Jay Lynch and painted by Zina Saunders, 2002. Produced for the Midwest Non-Sport Trading Card Show and the Philly Non-Sports Card Show, the cards were ingeniously designed so that the two images could fit together from any direction ad infinitum. Both Lynch and Saunders are featured alongside the Martians. Norm Saunders, Zina’s father, is depicted at the top of the card below.
Mars Attacks Page 2