Marvel Universe Series III (Impel)

With the continued success of its trading cards, Impel and Marvel followed up their Marvel Universe series of cards with yet another outing, releasing the third series in 1992. As someone who collected these cards back in the day, I was personally finding that with each passing series the card designs, while getting flashier, weren't necessarily better. I still find the first series to be far superior to all of them.

The duo upped the anti this time around, boosting the base set to a whopping two hundred cards. Additionally, they restructured the sub series within slightly. While you'd still find the basic Super Heroes, Villains and Rookies categories, they also included new ones, such as Wars, Cosmic Beings and Origins. Additionally, they tweked the chase cards from that of their prior holofoils to 3D holographic.

While they're difficult to see - in person just as much as in photograph form, the 3D holographic cards are pretty sweet. I think in my time of opening packs I only pulled one, and I want to say it was Venom - Though I honestly don't remember at this point.

Though I'm not necessarily a fan of the design, I do find it interesting that the cards were intended to be two giant posters. If you line up ten cards, and then create ten rows of them in numeric order, you'll see that all the backgrounds connect.

Because binder sleeves for cards are 3 X 3, for a total of nine cards, it's odd that Marvel didn't design this to be in clusters of nine. Don't get me wrong, a massive poster of one hundred cards is impressive, but I can't imagine too many people found a feasible way to display these. Not without taping or gluing them inside of a frame - And what card collector is going to do that?

While the Marvel Universe trading card series would continue on over the years, series three marked the last for Impel. The license shifted to Skybox and Fleer who worked in conjunction to produce multiple varying Marvel related sets throughout the remainder of the 90's.

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