FROM NORM SAUNDERS’ BATMAN TO JOHN POUND’S GARBAGE PAIL KIDS, COLLECTORS ARE CLAMORING FOR ARTISTS’ HAND-PAINTED ILLUSTRATIONS
By Jesse Hughey | January 6, 2026
Trading cards, a collectible cardboard currency signifying anything from a Hall of Fame ballplayer to a comic book hero to an original sight gag, have been a pop-culture phenomenon for decades. While the value of a given sports card is almost always inextricable from the athlete it represents, for non-sports cards, it is all about the art.
For serious fans looking to expand their collections beyond the cards themselves, investing in the original art is a logical, rewarding, and potentially lucrative next step in the hobby. Perhaps more important, it can be an avenue to directly elevate and support a favorite artist – an increasingly important aspect of the hobby as digital workflows, automation, and the use of AI-generated imagery threaten to choke the life out of the sometimes messy, inefficient, and unpredictable human creative process in favor of rapid production.
Norm Saunders’ original artwork for ‘The Bat Signal,’ Card No. 3 in the 1966 Topps Batman-Black Bat set, realized $25,200 in a January 2024 Heritage auction.
Saunders’ original art for ‘A Soldier Fights Back,’ Card No. 18 in Topps’ 1962 Mars Attacks series, sold for $150,000 in a November 2025 Heritage auction.
“No camera – and certainly no algorithm – can express mood and personality the way an original illustration can,” says Jeremy J.J. Allen, Assistant Director of Popular Culture at Heritage Auctions. Allen is a passionate collector of non-sports trading cards as well as the original artworks at the heart of the hobby. “Photography is an art form, of course, and it can be expressive and creative. Ultimately, though, photos capture the facts of a moment. Artwork gives them meaning and tells a story.”
Original art carries the personality of its creator and embodies the creative decisions, the imperfections, the intuition, and the emotion that only a human artist can express. The emotional and cultural value carried by a hand-created work is worth more to serious collectors than anything mass production can offer. Artificial intelligence can fill a blank space with lines and colors that mimic a human artist’s style, but this output signifies nothing. Creators may adopt digital refinement, advanced printing methods, augmented reality, and other advances in the digital age, but only work that grows from the unique ideas and techniques of a human artist has significance.
“The hobby thrives when artists thrive,” Allen says. “Artists’ imaginations are what make trading cards relevant, collectible, and emotionally resonant.”
Saunders joined forces with Basil Wolverton and Wally Wood for this original art for Topps’ 1966 Make Your Own Name stickers. The group of six illustrations realized $57,600 in a November 2020 Heritage auction.
Painted by John Pound, this unpublished original art was originally intended to be used for a revival of Wacky Packages. Instead, it launched the Garbage Pail Kids craze of the 1980s. The piece realized $106,250 in an October 2023 Heritage auction.
Influenced by early tobacco cards, pulp artworks, 1950s science fiction, and 1960s pop culture, painters and illustrators like Norm Saunders, Basil Wolverton, Wally Wood, and John Pound laid the groundwork for what the hobby would become through their work on Topps Wacky Packages and other humor and gag cards. Their names, and those of the modern masters who would follow, carry value and establish the context in which a card was created.
The impact of Saunders’ work with the Mars Attacks series can hardly be exaggerated. Saunders first created lurid painted covers for pulp and men’s magazines and dramatic painted comic book and paperback covers, then combined sci-fi horror, muscular heroic drama, and kitschy humor to memorable effect in the incredible 1962 Mars Attacks series for Topps, which led to Tim Burton’s cult classic 1996 film adaptation Mars Attacks! Saunders also provided paintings for the highly regarded 1966 Topps Batman bubblegum cards released to coincide with the Adam West television series.
Wolverton, nicknamed the “Producer of Preposterous Pictures of Peculiar People Who Prowl this Perplexing Planet,” is known for his intricate and grotesque caricatures, such as his original character Lena the Hyena. Along with working in comics and humor magazines such as MAD, Cracked, and Cockeyed, he worked on the Ugly Hang-Ups series of cards for Topps.
Greg and Tim Hildebrandt’s original artwork for the 1994 Fleer Marvel Masterpieces No. 115 Spider-Man card sold for $81,250 in a May 2025 Heritage auction, alongside a preliminary sketch of the painting and a PSA 10-graded example of the card.
Bob Larkin Fleer Ultra X-Men ’94 X-Men’s Greatest Battles No. 4 ‘Wolverine vs. Sentinels’ original art. Sold for $45,000 in a September 2025 Heritage auction.
Wood was a versatile artist whose output included science fiction, comic books, and humor and satire. He worked with Saunders on the Mars Attacks series as well as other Topps projects including Ugly Stickers, Wanted Posters, Crazy Little Comics, and Nasty Notes.
In the 1980s, for a planned revival of Wacky Packages, Pound painted a dirty, cigar-smoking tot emerging from a trash can, framed by a box touting “Official papers inside! (Send to Dept. of Sanitation),” a parody of the massively popular Cabbage Patch Kids toys. Instead of relaunching the earlier card series, however, it turned out to be the birth of Garbage Pail Kids, the gross-out trading card sensation.
Original works from these four artists can fetch up to six figures at auction today, with Pound’s first GPK going for $106,250 at Heritage in October 2023 and Saunders’ Mars Attacks No. 18 selling for $150,000 in November 2025.
Newer artists have taken up the torch and continue to elevate cards into fine art prints in miniature. Joe Jusko, Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, Bob Larkin, Jim Lee, Tom Morgan, Bernie Wrightson, and Ken Kelly were icons of the 1990s. Their original works frequently go for five-digit sums. Modern masters still at work today include Dan dos Santos, Simone Bianchi, and Meghan Hetrick, and auction prices for their original canvases reflect the respect their works command.
Dan dos Santos 2023 Skybox Marvel Masterpieces Canvas Gallery No. 93 Wolverine original artwork. Sold for $22,500 in a May 2025 Heritage auction, alongside the final card and a preliminary pencil sketch of the card.
Dos Santos’ original art for the 2023 Skybox Marvel Masterpieces No. 61 Rocket Raccoon card realized $10,000 in a May 2025 Heritage auction.
One element of collectibles that adds to their value is how uncommon they are.
“You can’t get scarcer than an original artwork,” Allen points out. “The physical presence, its direct connection to its creator, cannot be reproduced or manufactured into existence. Parallels, variants, and digital assets may offer engineered rarity to trading cards, but an original artwork is truly one of a kind.”
That distinction, he says, is why collectors have pursued original pieces related to the hobby across every decade, just as aficionados and patrons of the arts have collected original paintings, sculptures, and other works of art for centuries.
Of course, it takes more than rarity alone to prompt a connection to an artwork for a collector. The creativity and humanity behind the images they love is the real hook for collectors of original artwork. Original paintings and illustrations shaped the earliest trading cards, continue to define the most celebrated modern sets, and are essential to the long-term cultural significance of the hobby.
“Collectors value the origin of a piece as much as the image itself,” Allen says. “They want to know who made it, how it was made, and why.”
