Any comic fan who was alive in the ‘90s remembers the thrill of those old comic book trading cards. Cool art you could carry to school with you and that included images from amazing artists. They might even have come from comics you otherwise would have never heard of, and included info on the back that served the same function as a Wiki does today on your phone. They were the best. That’s why the new DC Annual series from Upper Deck is exciting. “Doing comic book themed trading cards was really in our DNA,” says Travis Rhea, Upper Deck’s director of entertainment brands in an interview.  “Inside of the building, there’s a lot of passion for comic books,” Rhea tells us. “…back in the ‘90s, Fleer and Skybox and Impel [brands that eventually came under the Upper Deck umbrella] were all making comic book-based cards.” These are the ur-trading cards that fans all look back on fondly—the Fleer Ultra X-Men set, or the Skybox Marvel Masterpieces, with full painted art from luminaries like Joe Jusko or the Hildebrandts. And it’s impossible to work on something like this without falling down a rabbit hole of fandom. Rhea himself has a long history as a geek. “I was a big comic collector for years and a trading card collector, but mostly baseball cards,” he says. “Fast forward to my time working with Upper Deck, which I started in 2008. I started trying to collect again around that era.” And that led to today, with Upper Deck partnering with DC Comics for multiple sets a year of cards based on DC’s enormous catalogue of characters, stories and artists.  According to the executive, there are two teams in the company responsible for putting a set together. “We have our product development team, who are our product managers,” Rhea explains. “They’re the ones who dream up the overall theming of the set, what they want each card to look like, and what its content should generally be.”  Product development is responsible for the big picture decisions about how to position theming, picking what stories they want to highlight, how big the set will be, special finishes for cards, and so on. For example, they chose Beast World as a story arc that they wanted to focus on. This set the theme for the whole set.  From there product development hands it over to a specific content team who gets to work on the individual cards. They decide on specific characters and moments from the story, and eventually start producing actual cards. Notes Rhea,“[They say] Here’s the checklist. These are the characters we’re going to feature. I want images from this issue, this issue, [and that] issue.” They then decide about chase cards—rare drops, or special finishes. Upper Deck is applying some of those special finishes to this new DC set like lenticular cards. Rhea tells us: “You’re going to see it for the first time on DC artwork. You can’t just take an image and…hit a button and now it’s 3D. You have to actually dissect that image, layer by layer and put it on [the card] a different way.”  It’s not just taking existing art from the pages of the DC stories that’s exciting. “What really gets my heart pumping is seeing the new artwork because that’s one of the things we really pride ourselves on. We generate a ton of original artwork,” he says. They’ve got hitters from DC’s current crop of artists lined up, as well as special autograph cards with signatures from folks like Nicola Scott, Tom Taylor, and Mark Waid on special cards.  The 23/24 Upper Deck Annual set is out now, but there’s plenty in the hopper to be excited by. “One of the big sets out this year will be a Metal Universe Batman Skybox set… I’m excited about ramping up this relationship, and creating something that fans of DC can count on and look forward to year after year.” But it’s hard not to get carried away as a fan and collector who works in the business. As Rhea adds, “It’s a little challenging as an employee, right? You don’t want to be the alcoholic bartender.” A few treats might not hurt though. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!