When Marvel Launched Its Barbie Comics, It Included Barbie...Credit Cards?

When Marvel launched its Barbie comic book line, the first issues came with an unusual bonus, Barbie...credit cards?!

Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me. Today, I discuss how Marvel included Barbie "credit cards" in the first issues of Marvel's line of Barbie comics in the early 1990s.

One of the great challenges in the world of dolls is the concept of verisimilitude. In general, kids love it when their dolls mimic real life, but there is always a question of how much "reality" is TOO much reality. In the recent blockbuster Barbie film, the movie pokes fun at some of Mattel's past attempts at mimicking real life that likely went TOO far, like the Skipper doll meant to mimic puberty by showing her breasts getting larger, or the toy dog that actually poops out little round feces balls.

A specific challenge with Barbie is that she is inherently a character that is connected to shopping, since Barbie is so famous for having a lot of different outfits. With so many outfits, it is only natural, then, for Mattel to think that it might be fun for kids to play with Barbie as she goes shopping for new outfits. Once you introduce THAT idea, though, how do you handle the concept of how Barbie actually PAYS for all of these clothes? Naturally, when you start including concepts like credit cards, you're accused of being too commercialistic, but at the same time, if you DON'T include credit cards, you're accused of not being realistic enough. It's a tough situation, but it is amusing to see that Marvel actually went through a similar situation when it decided to include some props in the first issues of Barbie's ongoing series, and one of the gimmick props was...a Barbie credit card!

How have parents responded to past Barbie toys with "play" credit cards?

In 1997, Mattel drew criticism for its release of a Barbie playset called "Cool Shoppin' Barbie." It is a boutique that Barbie runs filled with clothes to sell, and it had a digital cash register with plastic MasterCard credit card that can be inserted, and it will announce, "Credit approved." It was part of a string of licensing deals that Mattel struck in the late 1990s with a number of brands, including Harley Davidson motorcycles and a special Bloomingdale's Barbie.

However, a number of parents took issue with this credit card tie-in. According to the Los Angeles Times:

“It’s inexcusable for MasterCard to use this format,” said Susan Price of Boscobel, Wis. “They’re messing with our children. Their goal is to grow [children] up with a MasterCard in their purse.” Price has fired off letters to Mattel, more than 100 newspapers and an Internet bulletin board.

Mattel naturally stressed the verisimilitude factor of it all, with the article quoting Mattel spokesperson Lisa McKendall, “It’s so a child can really pretend. We thought it would be fun for her to run the card through the scanner,”

While that toy might have drawn some outrage (and, to be fair, specifically cutting a tie-in deal with MasterCard seems a bit out of the ordinary), Barbie toys in the years since have commonly included credit card options in them. In this case, at least, verisimilitude won out. What's amusing, though, is that Marvel beat MasterCard to the concept years earlier with its Barbie comics in 1990!

How did Marvel include Barbie credit cards in its Barbie comic book line?

1990 was really the year that Marvel discovered the benefits of the poly bag. You see, when the direct market started to come to prominence in the 1980s, comic book companies quickly realized that they could spend more money on their releases since they were not making a higher profit on the comic book sales. When the comic books were sold mainly on newsstands, companies would have to take back returns, so they would often be printing 200,000 copies to sell 100,000 copies (or less). Therefore, the profit margins were threadbare.

With the direct market, you could sell 90,000 copies and make more money than selling 100,000 copies on the newsstand, because you only had to print 90,000. As the direct market became a bigger and bigger deal, and the comic book market was going through a boom period starting in the late 1980s, comic book companies began to experiment with "gimmicks," with one of the most famous ones of 1990 being Silver Surfer #50 having a foil cover on the direct market edition of the comic (the newsstand edition did not, because, again, the foil cover cost more to make, so it cost too much for the newsstand edition).

However, while foil covers couldn't translate to the newsstand, other gimmick options COULD, and one of those was the idea of including a "bonus" item with the comic book while putting the whole comic book into a poly bag (a poly bag is just a generic term for soft, cheap plastic, often used for sale mailings). Of course, that meant that the "bonus" had to be pretty easy to produce and also quite thin. Naturally, then, trading cards became the go-to gimmick for this sort of thing, with the most famous example being 1991's X-Force #1, which had a different trading card in each poly bagged issue (of six possible trading card options)...

However, for Barbie and Barbie Fashion, Marvel's two Barbie comics that launched in 1990, the company decided to go for a different thin insert for the bagged comics.

Both books came bagged with two different possible "prizes."