How ‘90s Marvel cards defined X-Men, Spider-Man, and Hulk’s power levels

What is the strength gap between Daredevil and Spider-Man for Daredevil? Could Wolverine’s stamina handle the energy projection of, say, Galactus? Could Deadpool’s durability withstand the full force of Bishop’s energy projection?

One eternal question spans all of pop culture: “Who would win?” That’s why we’re dedicating an entire week to debates that have shaped comics, movies, TV, and games, for better and worse. Prepare yourself for Polygon’s Who Would Win Week..

In the early 1990s, Marvel Comics released a series of popular trading card sets called “Marvel Universe” that changed fan debates forever by using power rankings to assign relative ability levels to different characters. They gave fans concrete numbers that they could refer to in arguing about character attributes. This helped drive the crossover comic trading cards business.

Marvel’s foray into trading cards paralleled the company’s boom and bust fortunes of the ’90s. Without the stats and ratings on the back, the cards likely wouldn’t have been as successful, even with the rabid comic fans at the time. And history suggests the success of the cards changed the course of Marvel’s history.

Alternate revenue sources: A mystical art

Marvel was seeing increased sales across its company, with new titles and top-line characters doing well. Marvel began to look for ways to make more money. Trading cards was one way to make money. Cards were experiencing a parallel boom. It made sense.

Image courtesy of Marvel Comics

Marvel’s then-editor-in-chief, Tom DeFalco, put special projects editor Bob Budiansky in charge of putting together a new card set with trading card company Impel. As the company’s top editor, DeFalco didn’t have much time to manage the project alongside the exploding comics market — “They were not one of my highest priorities,” he told Polygon on a recent call — because he was managing the expectations of a hungry board of directors who expected Marvel to continue delivering on the huge sales that the company was generating. In 1990, Todd MacFarlane’s Spider-Man #1Records were broken; the records were broken by both launches a year later X-ForceAnd X-Men.

Budiansky began his career at Marvel as a freelancer in 1976. He then moved up to an editorial post of lower rank and was promoted to the position of editor in 1983. To meet the increasing demand for merchandise in 1985, Jim Shooter, the editor-in-chief, created the role of special projects editor and appointed Budiansky to this position. Part of his work in the ’80s was to manage the merchandising of Transformers comics and toys, specifically the “back of the box” copy that came with the figures.

“We found people who I trained how to write the backs of the cards,” Budiansky said. “I’d been writing the backs of toy boxes for Hasbro for a number of years for Transformers, so I had a certain style I was looking for, how to say something that gave you a complete feeling of who this character is, but say it very briefly in a few sentences.”

Budiansky’s experience in the field meant that he was well-suited for leading the Marvel Universe cards development. Marvel produced the trading cards themselves, keeping all the copy and artwork in house. Then, the company sent it to the card company for distribution and production.

“Before that, the creative was done outside of Marvel — they would provide, as they did to all sorts of licensing requirements, artwork that already existed,” Budiansky said. “On very rare occasions they might generate some new artwork, but usually they just picked up some good enough shot of whichever character, Spider-Man or Hulk or something, and they stuck it on a lunchbox. Marvel was responsible for all artwork. Marvel wrote all of the copy. Marvel was responsible for the design. Marvel did all the production work.”

Marvel handled the creation while Impel still published the cards. The two companies needed to cooperate. Budiansky had creative control over the creation, but had to manage that with the less shrewd executives of Impel who had an interest in the final product. Impel’s people had a sports background, not comics, and lacked the confidence that Budiansky and Marvel did in the ability for the comic characters to carry a line of trading cards. In order to appease the card company executives, Budiansky and his team decided to include stats on the back of the cards, much like sports cards had, showing characters’ wins and losses in fights.

The card for Spider-Man in the black costume, the set’s number 2, is a good example of this approach. On the back, he claims to have fought 982 battles and won 620 of them, lost 328 of them, and tied 34. This gives him a 63% win rate.

“We made all that stuff up,” Budiansky said. “We didn’t go through a thousand books and count all the battles with this character; we just made it up. Number one, we wanted to make the Impel executives happy, and number two, we thought it would be fun.”

Images: Marvel Comics/HipComic/BigRedComics

Budiansky and his group decided in 1991 to drop the false stats and go straight to power ranking. They had more concrete citations in mind for the second set, using the Marvel Universe Handbooks put together by executive editor Mark Gruenwald in the ‘80s.

The nerve center of Marvel’s unofficial canon database, Gruenwald was consulted by the cards team to ensure it had things right for the audience, which ranged from die-hard fans to art collectors. The young editor was a trusted resource for creators due to his meticulous attention and extensive knowledge about the power levels of different characters.

Power rankings could be represented as a number from 1 to 7. The cards contained a key with which to understand the varying levels; helpful when distinguishing between “normal” (1) and “metahuman” or other variations of the extreme end (7). Over the years, how these rankings were created changed. The cards had a bar chart in the upper left corner of the back in 1991. As the design and manufactures changed, so did the ranking. (Impel — later Skybox — handled the first three sets, then Fleer, which Marvel bought in 1992, took over.) The sets were updated with energy projection, which was a great addition to a continuity in which characters frequently blasted one another.

Glenn Greenberg, one of Budiansky’s deputies in the early ’90s, said in an interview with Polygon that the genesis of the power ranking idea came from an early ‘80s Spider-Man annual where the titular character told readers how he’d line up against other characters. A lot of fans started complaining to the editors about certain characters’ placements and began nitpicking. The annual’s success — and the reader reaction — may well have sparked the idea for the handbook proper.

“When we were doing trading cards, I think it just made sense to kind of put those kinds of rankings,” Greenberg said.

Even with Gruenwald’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Marvel universe, the team sometimes had to use guesswork to get the rankings to a viable point. To place newer characters into the Canon, such as those with backstories or rankings that were not prewritten, they had to guess. For their assessments of power, the team went to Marvel editors. They used the existing resource of editorial knowledge about lore to place characters correctly.

“If you go through each of the entries for the various characters, it would give you basically a power ranking,” Greenberg said. “So you could easily cross reference to see how strong Spider-Man is versus, say, Daredevil on one end of the spectrum or the Hulk on the other.”

Spider-Man was the Marvel Universe’s all-man superhero. This made him a solid baseline. Spidey was usually at four strength levels, which is superhuman. Daredevil was at two peak humans, while Hulk at seven was the most powerful. There were limits to the scale — that level put Dr. Banner equal in power to world-devouring demigod Galactus — but generally the rating system worked well. You could even have more abstract discussions about how skills and power are relative to each other, like whether two-level strength characters with four-level intelligence can outsmart seven of them and defeat them.

Good things everywhere

Marvel acquired the businesses it had been working with as it grew. In 1992, Marvel bought trading card company Fleer in 1992, adding one of the country’s largest collectible card producers to the comic giant’s portfolio. Marvel purchased Impel in 1995. “Marvel was taking in house the entire production of the cards,” Budiansky said. Trouble was on the horizon. The 1994 baseball and hockey strikes soured the public on two major parts of the card company’s business. And as the unforeseen, negative consequences of the purchase became apparent — due in no small part to circumstances beyond Marvel’s control — it was one more burdensome expense that would quickly lead to collapse.

In 1989, Marvel was almost worth its weight in gold when Wall Street titan Ronald Perelman purchased it. Budiansky said that one bonus in the early ’90s, based on company sales, exceeded his pay for that entire year. This boom was not a joke. However, the boom also brought down the bust. The growth model that the new owners were pursuing just wasn’t sustainable.

“They were constantly buying things that would go out of business almost instantly,” DeFalco said.

Image courtesy of Marvel Comics

The market was fuelled by speculators who were in turn being served by the industry. This speculative madness created a bubble that burst. “Once you go public, if you make a certain percentage profit in a quarter, Wall Street expects you to continue making that kind of profit next quarter,” Budiansky said. Because Marvel couldn’t continue upping sales at the rate they needed to — profits weren’t going to continue to expand at the same rate — the company expanded horizontally, acquiring Fleer and then Skybox and gobbling up competitive companies like Malibu Comics.

Due to their success, Fleer was purchased by Skybox. Skybox collapsed shortly after. Greenberg said that Marvel’s higher-ups had made a mistake in trying to manage the company. This was based on their complete ignorance of the business. The people Perelman put in charge of Marvel saw the company’s product as widgets, Greenberg told Polygon, that they could move around like any other commodity and generate sales just as if they were any other product rather than creative works of art.

The industry began to target speculators by using gimmicks. This led to an increase in market overflow, which undercut the exact thing special editions and holograms were intended to do. Marvel suffered a major setback after the speculators left the market.

In 1995, massive layoffs started and Marvel Comics declared bankruptcy a year later. This was quite a change from a decade ago, when DeFalco turned to Budiansky with his team to handle the trading cards. Marvel was now in serious jeopardy. For everyone, the bankruptcy was a terrible experience. Greenberg described the stress of going into work and expecting that to be the day you’d lose your job — every day for years.

Gruenwald was just 43 when he died of a heart attack. This was a devastating loss for the company.

“You talk to people who were closest to him and they will tell you that he died of a broken heart because he saw what was happening to the company,” Greenberg said. “He loved it there. He was the heart and soul of the place.”

The legacy

Through 1994, the Marvel Universe series ran with series four through five being produced by Fleer. Other sets, including 1992’s Budiansky and Jim Lee designed X-Men collection, had also used the system. After the Universe sets ended, the ratings system appeared in some card collections, but not all — this was because the art was the primary appeal of many card sets, as in the Masterpiece collections. Marvel ended their comic-book trading card experiment in 1999 when they sold Skybox and Fleer.

From sport statistics ratings, the power ranking system was born. It was logical and predated the fantasy sports marketplace that existed today, in which players of different teams were put into different formations to find out who would win. To Marvel fans, the power rankings on the backs of the cards allowed for a way of pitting characters against one another in a way where one could cite actual numbers — FiveThirtyEight for the comic clique.

America was always a statistics-hungry culture. It’s how we interpret sports and, increasingly, everything else. The polling process that determines the relative strength and weakness of each political position is a growing one. The competitive twist of statistical analysis gives audiences the ability to ask, regardless of topic: “Who would win?”