1962 Topps Mars Attacks #1 The Invasion Begins — One PSA 10 in the Entire 55-Card Set, and It Isn't This Card
PSA has graded 22,294 copies of the 1962 Topps Mars Attacks set. It has awarded exactly one Gem Mint 10 — and it is not this card.
Card #1, The Invasion Begins, is the opening frame of the most notorious story ever told on cardboard: a Martian in a green pressure suit, brain exposed under a glass dome, pointing his troops toward Earth while a formation of saucers lifts off behind him. It is also, by PSA's own numbers, one of the hardest cards in the set to find clean.
PSA Population Report
| PSA Grade | Population |
|---|---|
| PSA 10 | 0 |
| PSA 9 | 1 |
| PSA 8 | 19 |
| Total Graded (All Grades) | 447 |
* Population data as of September 4, 2026. PSA population counts are dynamic and increase as more cards are submitted for grading.
Read the Whole Curve, Not the Table
The four-row table above is the standard summary, and on this card it hides almost everything interesting. The 447 straight grades break down across the full ladder, and the shape is unusual even for 1962 cardboard.
The peak is the PSA 4, with 98 copies. Grades 2 through 5 hold 306 of the 446 numerically graded copies — better than two in three. The population then falls off a cliff: 60 sixes, 44 sevens, 19 eights, one nine, no tens. Twenty copies of this card have graded PSA 8 or better, out of 446. That is 4.5%. Above the 8 there is a single card in the world.
The qualified grades sharpen the same point. Beyond the 447 straight grades sit 39 half-grades and 42 qualified slabs — 528 holders in total. Among those qualifiers are eight PSA 8s and two PSA 9s. At the top of this card's population, flagged copies outnumber clean ones two to one.
The Set's Only PSA 10 Is on Card #29
Because PSA's CardFacts identifiers run sequentially by card number within a set, the entire 55-card checklist can be read one card at a time. This blog pulled all 55 on September 4, 2026. The set totals:
- 19,332 straight grades, plus 992 half-grades and 1,970 qualified — 22,294 PSA holders in all.
- 243 PSA 9s across all 55 cards, and 2,312 PSA 8s.
- One PSA 10 in the entire set, on card #29, Death in the Shelter. Fifty-four of the fifty-five cards have never produced one.
Roughly 1.26% of every straight grade PSA has assigned in this set is a 9 or better. That is the ceiling for a 64-year-old card printed on thin stock, cut loose, and handled by children who were not treating it as an asset.
The Most-Collected Card Is the Hardest One to Find Clean
Here is the finding that took the full set sweep to see. The Invasion Begins is the second-most-submitted card in the set — 447 straight grades, behind only #21 Prize Captive at 458. And it has the fewest PSA 8s of any card on the checklist: 19.
Set that against its neighbours at the top of the submission table. #21 has 52 eights. #36 Destroying a Dog has 63. #48 has 57, #46 has 57, #24 has 65. Every other card in the ten most-submitted has more PSA 8s than card #1, and five of them have at least three times as many. Volume is not the explanation here — this card has been sent in more often than almost any other and returns high grades less often than all of them.
The reading this blog takes from it is the obvious one, and it is a reading rather than a finding: card #1 sits on top of the stack. It is the card facing outward in a rubber-banded bundle, the one on top in the shoebox, the first thing a kid's thumb touched. Nothing in PSA's data states a cause — the data state the outcome, and the outcome is that the set's front door is its scarcest clean card.
The Set They Stopped Printing
Topps issued the 55-card series in 1962 under the name Bubbles, Inc. The concept came from Len Brown and Woody Gelman; Wally Wood and Bob Powell produced the sketches, and Norman Saunders painted the finished art. The cards were test-marketed under the title Attack from Space before the name became Mars Attacks.
They did not last. The artwork — people and animals burned, disintegrated and eaten alive across a 55-card narrative arc — drew complaints from parents and teachers almost immediately. Hobby histories record that Topps agreed to redraw a portion of the set to tone it down, and that after a complaint from a Connecticut district attorney the company halted production entirely before the replacement art was ever printed. What survives is a short, complete, notorious run that has been in demand ever since.
The Card in the Picture
The example pictured above is a horizontal card in a PSA NM 7 holder, cert 60108319, labelled 1962 MARS ATTACKS — THE INVASION BEGINS — #1. A 7 is a long way from the top of a grading scale. On this card it is two rungs from the top of the entire population.
Against the Blog's Own Non-Sports File
Five non-sports cards have run as Card of the Day here, and every one of them has produced a PSA 10: CASE #0296's 1999 Pokémon Charizard (123), CASE #0016's 1985 Garbage Pail Kids Adam Bomb (18), CASE #0190's 1985 Topps WWF Hulk Hogan (15), CASE #0250's 1966 Topps Superman #1 (2) and CASE #0280's 1966 Donruss Marvel Super Heroes Iron Man (1). CASE #0250 is the closest comparison — another Topps non-sport #1 from the mid-sixties — and even that card, on a population of 132, has two.
This one has none, on 447.
Verdict: the first card of the most infamous set Topps ever pulled from shelves has been graded 447 times without producing a Gem Mint copy, and the whole 55-card checklist has produced exactly one across 22,294 holders. The Invasion Begins is not rare. A clean one is.
