1966 Donruss Marvel Super Heroes #12 — Iron Man's First Card, 191 Graded, One PSA 10
Iron Man's first trading card does not have his name on the front, does not have his face on the front, and is mostly a joke about somebody else's cape. He is the small red-and-gold figure at the bottom edge, arm raised, dwarfed by a cloaked giant who fills the rest of the frame. The caption — the only text on the card's face — reads "GET THE LEAD OUT!"
Three Years Behind the Comic
Marvel published Iron Man's debut in Tales of Suspense #39 on March 1, 1963, written by Stan Lee and Larry Lieber with pencils credited to Gene Colan, Steve Ditko and Don Heck. Marvel's own listing for the issue still bills it plainly: "The First Appearance of Iron Man!"
The cardboard took another three years. His first card is #12 in the 1966 Donruss Marvel Super Heroes set, and TCDB's records show nothing earlier for him — the 1966 issue is where Iron Man enters the hobby.
The Card Tells You It's the Rookie
You do not have to take a database's word for which card starts his run, because the card says so itself. Along the bottom border, in the same fine print that reads "COLLECT ALL 66 CARDS (© 1966 MCG)," the set declares:
IRON MAN CARDS NUMBERS 12-22
Eleven cards, and #12 is the first of them. That is a subset boundary printed on the object itself, which is a better provenance than most rookie-card claims in this hobby can manage.
The set's whole conceit is that it is a gag set. Marvel's artwork, carrying the © 1966 MCG line, runs under punchline captions — cards in this run carry captions like "I hate these toy kits!" and "Do you have iron deficiency anemia?", and two of them simply say "(Write your own caption)". Nobody in the set is introduced by name on the front. An Iron Man collector coming to this card expecting a portrait and a nameplate is going to be disappointed, and that is precisely what makes it interesting: the first Iron Man card was never designed to be a first Iron Man card.
The copy pictured above sits in a PSA NM 7 holder, certification number 16262693.
PSA Population Report
| PSA Grade | Population |
|---|---|
| PSA 10 | 1 |
| PSA 9 | 4 |
| PSA 8 | 20 |
| Total Graded (All Grades) | 191 |
* Population data as of August 24, 2026. PSA population counts are dynamic and increase as more cards are submitted for grading.
What the Numbers Say
One. In sixty years, across every copy anyone has ever thought worth paying to encapsulate, PSA has graded exactly one Gem Mint example of Iron Man's first card. Four more have come back Mint 9. That is five copies, total, at the top two grades — a gem rate of 0.52%, or one in 191.
The straight-grade count understates the holdings slightly. PSA also records 8 half grades and 25 with a qualifier, which are separate buckets rather than slices of the 191 — 224 slabs in all. The qualified group is worth a glance on its own: seven of the 25 sit at PSA 9, against four clean nines. At the grade just below gem, more of these cards carry a named flaw than don't.
The bulk of the population lives where you would expect a 1966 gag card aimed at children to live. It peaks at PSA 4 with 43 copies and stays heavy through 5 and 6; only 25 copies in total have ever graded a straight 8 or better.
The reading here is ours, not PSA's: a card like this was never protected. It had no perceived value at the time, it was printed on cheap stock with a dark, ink-heavy border that shows every handling mark, and the people who owned it were the target audience for a joke about lead. Survival at the top of the scale is close to accidental — which is the difference between this and a modern rookie card, where scarcity is a design decision rather than an accident of neglect.
Verdict: the first card of a character who now anchors a multi-billion-dollar franchise is a 1966 punchline that barely shows him, and only one perfect copy has ever surfaced. Iron Man got the last laugh; the card never did.
