The Uncanny X-Men Trading Cards features award-winning illustrator Jim Lee’s legendary X-Men art with this annotated, digest-size collection of the complete 1992 set—including 4 bonus cards!
Foreword by Edward Piskor
In 1992, Marvel Entertainment commissioned Jim Lee, the young superstar penciller behind X-Men (1991) #1, the bestselling single-issue comic book of the modern era, to create all of the art for a new set of 105 trading cards—a set that would go on to become one of the most celebrated in Marvel history and the gold standard for non-sports trading-card artwork and design.
Lee was the first artist to create all of the original artwork for a Marvel card set; his dynamic character portraits, battle scenes, team shots, and innovative nine-card Danger Room puzzle cards helped fuel both the ‘90s boom of comic-book trading cards and the general public’s mania for all things X-Men. Fans of the chart-topping comics could turn to the cards for further insight into their favorite characters, as Marvel writers and editors included bios, stats, and trivia for each hero and villain.
The Uncanny X-Men Trading Cards: The Complete Series collects, for the first time, the front and back of each collectible card in the set—including Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Magneto, and Deadpool—along with select scans of Lee’s original and digitally remastered art. It also includes an introduction by and original interviews conducted by writer and set editor Bob Budiansky, with the Marvel staff who helped assemble, design, and create these iconic trading cards.
Comic book illustrator Jim Lee is the editorial director of WildStorm Studios (which he founded in 1992) and the artist for many of DC Comics’ bestselling comic book and graphic novels, including All Star Batman & Robin,Batman: Hush, and Superman: For Tomorrow. He also serves as the creative director for the DC Universe Online video game. Prior to DC, he was one of the founding fathers of Image Comics and best known for his run on the X-Men for Marvel Comics, during which he cocreated such characters as Gambit and Agent Zero. In his spare time, Lee enjoys a good laugh or two.
Ed Piskor lives and draws out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His New York Times bestselling series Hip Hop Family Tree, which was originally serialized on Boing Boing, has gone back to print numerous times and won the 2015 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. His books include Red Room from Fantagraphics. His series for Marvel, X-Men: Grand Design, was released in 2017 to wide acclaim.
Bob Budiansky is an American comic-book creator and editor. During his decades-long tenure at Marvel he penciled Ghost Rider and created and wrote Sleepwalker. As editor, he oversaw Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Spider- Man, and eleven sets of Marvel trading cards in the early ‘90s, including the 1992 Impel X-Men trading card set. He is perhaps best known for writing The Transformers comic and naming and developing hundreds of Transformers characters for Hasbro Toys.
