Topps Mars Attacks Trading Cards

In the early 1980s, at a comic book shop near my grandmother’s apartment, I saw my first Mars Attacks cards. I had never heard of them before, but there they were under glass, so I thought they must be important. They looked old, but the imagery was colorful and intriguingly violent. So naturally, I wanted them. The problem was they were already pretty expensive. So I started putting money aside hoping to talk the owner down and land at least one of the cards. Eventually I managed to start my collection with a card in rough shape that I paid five dollars for. Over the months trying to get just that one card I learned that the series went all the way back to 1962 and that at this rate I was never going to get my hands on all 55 of the original cards.Support the Retroist on PatreonTopps is well known in the sports card business, but they had already been doing non-sports cards for over a decade by the time they released Mars Attacks. In fact, the company got its start with a set called…