The 1990s were the golden age for a lot of things in pop culture. Trading cards were one of them.

I’m not sure exactly what sales figures were like, but I can safely say that fan enthusiasm when Marvel Masterpieces was released in 1992 was off the scale. It was exhilarating to see Joe Jusko’s ultra-high quality, painted art presented on high quality trading cards.

I know comic cards had been around since long before, but the Masterpieces kicked off a boom that lasted for the next few years. Inevitably, DC got in on the act and ramped up releases for many new card sets. Nothing from anybody matched the awesomeness of the Masterpieces, but we definitely got a lot of great stuff nevertheless.

DC Cosmic Teams cards was something I had never heard of but came to my attention recently. In addition to nostalgia, I was excited to find out that the set had a lot of original art from big names in comics at the time, including Phil Jimenez, Travis Charest, Kerry Gammill, and Dan Jurgens, among many others, which is great as it was never released anywhere else. As big of a fan as I am of the Death and Return of Superman, I never bought the trading card set because it was just panels sliced out of the comics.

Shortly after I had found out about these cards, I picked up a fairly inexpensive base set off eBay in great condition. The bad news is that among the 150 cards, there are a TON of characters I couldn’t care less about (sorry, Teen Titans fans…). The good news is that there is actually a fair amount of Superman material in this set, including art by Dan Jurgens, which makes sense given that he was drawing Superman and Justice League at the time.

This series was released in 1993, and must have been in the works when the Death story was released, as there are cards of Luthor II and Doomsday. Hence, the set has a good amount of nostalgia going for it. While not of the high quality production value of the Marvel Masterpieces, the cards are still sturdy, and look and feel nice.

I was on the fence about keeping them or not, since a lot of the set consists of flash in the pan characters of that period, but because of the Superman content I decided to stick it out (I’m also a Green Lantern fan and there’s some great material from that book too). The pictures sprinkled throughout this post are mostly from the binder and card pages I recently bought in order to keep it on my shelf.

Since DC isn’t putting out a whole lot of interesting stuff right now, I might occupy myself with digging into a few more of these card lines to get my fix for the time being.

If anyone is interested in picking up a set of these cards, they’re very affordable online and have a lot to enjoy.