This Week's Travel Reading

I hadn't been born yet when Mars Attacks cards made their brief appearance in 1962. Produced by Topps, the same folks who've done baseball cards (as well as many pop culture card sets) all these years, the Mars Attacks cards were a hit with kids, but horrified their parents with images of graphic violence--Martians killing people in various gruesome ways (burning, freezing, etc,) and even blowing away a faithful dog! Topps must have suspected something like this would happen--they produced the cards under the pseudonym Bubbles Inc.--and cut distribution of the cards off.

No matter. They became the stuff of legend anyway, feverishly collected and coveted. I didn't hear about them until the 1980s, when I read an article about them in Heavy Metal. I thought the artwork, painted by Norman Saunders based on design work by Bob Powell and Wally Wood, was terrific, but it's beyond me how Topps could not have seen how wildly inappropriate these things were for kids.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Mars Attacks card set, so the book above commemorates that event by reprinting the whole set with notes on their creation and pop-culture impact (including that awful Tim Burton movie), along with sketches by Powell and Wood and cards produced for later reissue sets.

Fun, sick and kinda creepy--perfect for the week before All Hallow's Eve!