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If you're a '90s comic fan, it's time to start rejoicing, as Dark Horse is developing a book collecting the art of Marvel's beloved trading card sets that were all the rage over 30 years ago. Marvel executive editor Tom Brevoort, who worked on many of Marvel's original trading card sets, spilled the news, explaining that he's been involved in assembling the collection himself.

"I worked on the first set of trading cards with [then Marvel editor Bob Budiansky], and he and I pretty much did all the sets with some other people. He and I did most of the work on the first four main sets, and the Marvel Masterpieces, and the early X-Men sets, and the early Spider-Man set. Dark Horse is working on a book," Brevoort tells Word Balloon. "They're talking to Bob and putting together a big compilation of all that artwork and a bunch of the behind-the-scenes."

Those original trading card sets were a huge staple of fandom in their heyday of the early to mid-'90s, introducing a whole generation of growing comic fans to characters, stories, and concepts they may have missed, along with background information and even which issues to read to get more of their new favorites.

Related: The most expensive Magic: The Gathering cards in the Marvel's Spider-Man set

Speaking personally, the idea of a collection of classic trading card art with behind-the-scenes info, not least because some of the original card sets did not include artist credits, a wrong that Brevoort says he and Budiansky are working to correct as consultants on Dark Horse's collection.

"A couple of months ago, Bob and I spent three hours on a video call one day cause he was trying to work out with me who were all the artists on all the original cards, cause the earliest cards had no credits on it, and there wasn't any record anywhere," Brevoort explains. "So he remembered what he could remember and then he reached out to me and said 'Hey can we go through these and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong or if you remember different.' Between the two of us we hopefully got most of that right. But that'll be a nice volume."

It's definitely a collection that will find a home on my shelves alongside my binders full of trading card sets. For those of us who couldn't always pick up a new comic, trading cards were cheap and fun ways to see what you were missing or to find places to start as a reader and collector. They were also a great tool for bonding among fans, sparking conversations and debates around the power stats that were sometimes included in the card info and getting to know new bits of comic book trivia.

According to Dark Horse's site, the collection, titled Marvel Universe Gallery: 1990-1994 Trading Card Collection, will release on September 8.

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