The 1979 Ping Pong Super Heróis set out of Brazil predates the 1980 Terrabusi by a full year. Global Card Auctions has taken a complete album on consignment.
Ask almost anyone in the hobby what the first Wolverine card is and you will get the same answer: the 1980 Terrabusi Super Heroes issue out of Argentina, card #86. It has been the accepted answer for years. It is the card that gets slabbed, the card that gets listed as a “rookie,” and the card that pricing conversations are built around.
It is not the first one, and until now almost nobody in the hobby had a reason to know that.
A year earlier, in 1979, a Brazilian gum company called Ping Pong released a 36-card set titled Super Heróis. Card #27 in that set is Wolverine, printed on the card as “VOLVERINE.” Right along the edge, in tiny type, it reads Copyright © 1979 Marvel Comics Group. The license year is printed on the card itself.
That makes the Ping Pong issue a full year older than the card the hobby has been treating as the first. This set has never had a real presence in the North American market. It is not in the price guides anyone reads, it has no meaningful graded population, and it rarely surfaces as a complete album.
What the Ping Pong set actually is
Ping Pong was a national chewing gum brand in Brazil, and like a lot of South American candy issues from that era, the cards were the giveaway, not the product. You bought gum. The card came with it.
The Super Heróis set runs 36 cards and does something you almost never see: it puts Marvel and DC side by side in the same set. Superman and Batman share pages with Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Green Goblin, Namor, Ms. Marvel, Black Panther, Ghost Rider, and Wolverine.
The physical card is unlike anything else in the hobby. It is tall and narrow, roughly two inches, printed on thin stock with essentially no borders and cut straight off the strip. Put it next to a Terrabusi and they do not look like they belong to the same era, let alone the same year.
Why nobody has seen one
Two reasons, and they compound.
The gum. These were wrapped in wax paper with the gum. That means wax and gum transfer on close to every surviving copy. It is fair to say there will never be a 10 of this card. It is also fair to say there will never be an unopened pack, unless somebody out there saved a piece of 1979 Brazilian bubble gum.
The album. Like most South American issues of the period, the set shipped with a supplemental album. You pulled a card, found its numbered slot, and glued it down. Read the bio in Portuguese, fill the book, done. That was the entire point of the product.
Which means the cards that survive at all mostly survive glued into albums. Loose, intact singles are the exception, not the rule.
The population gap
The 1980 Terrabusi is not a common card by any normal standard, but it is findable. There are well over a hundred known copies between raw and graded examples, and they trade with enough regularity that the market has a working sense of what one is worth.
The 1979 Ping Pong Wolverine has almost no comparable trail. There is no established population to reference and no run of public sales to anchor a price to.
Older, harder to find, and almost nobody knows it exists yet.
Why this matters beyond one card
The earliest card of a subject is usually the most expensive card of that subject. That is one of the most durable patterns in the hobby, and it holds across sports and non-sports alike.
Right now, most of the market is applying that logic to the wrong card. The premium is sitting on the 1980 issue while an older, scarcer, properly licensed 1979 issue sits almost entirely off the radar.
We are not telling anyone what the 1979 card is worth. That is what a market is for. What we are saying is that the date on the card is the date on the card, and it says 1979.
Offered exclusively through Global Card Auctions
We have taken on consignment a complete 1979 Ping Pong Super Heróis album, all 36 cards, including the Wolverine. It is available here and nowhere else.
This is the whole book. Cards pasted in their slots the way the set was meant to be collected, with the Portuguese bios, the original cover, and the full Marvel and DC run intact:
Given the fragility of the format, the gum and wax transfer, and the fact that most examples were glued into books that did not survive, an intact complete album is about as good as this set gets.
Interested in this album?
This piece is expected to bring five figures or more. If you would like to discuss it, or you have something of similar significance you are considering consigning, we would like to hear from you.
See the full breakdown
Breakout Cards walked through the album card by card, including the copyright line, the size comparison against the Terrabusi, and the album pages. Watch it on the Breakout Cards YouTube channel.
And if you know somebody who still calls the Terrabusi the rookie, send them this.
Global Card Auctions, LLC | Florida Auction License AB4273
