“I have to get that trading card.”

It was 1992, and that thought hit my brain like a lightning bolt as I toured the spinner rack in a Safeway 8 located in Anchorage, Alaska. One of the sundry comics within seemed to be wrapped in something, and on that packaging, it said you could find an “Official Marvel Trading Card” within. As someone who didn’t regularly read comics but did obsessively collect cards featuring Marvel’s heroes and villains, this was quite the hook. It’d be cool to read that comic, but I needed that card. So, I did the math and realized I had enough in my weekly allowance to get it. Sure of my path, I returned to my mom with prize in hand.

Uncanny X-Men #294 — the first comic I ever bought for myself — would be mine.

And it was all because a polybag caught my attention.

For those that don’t know, polybags are thin plastic bags that can be wrapped around a comic to add a little something something to the appeal of a release, with said bags doing everything from containing bonus materials — like the aforementioned X-Men card — to obfuscating a cover for one reason or another. While these have existed for decades, the 1990s were the apex of the tactic. Polybags became ubiquitous during that stretch, with the most famous deployments arguably belonging to the stratospheric debut of Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1, the black polybagged Superman #75 that hid (and raised attention to) The Death of Superman, and X-Force #1 and its assorted trading cards that came with. 9 Depending on who you ask, they’re either a charming relic from yesteryear or a symbol of a much worse time for the medium and industry.

Which means I have good news for the former and bad news for the latter: Polybags seem to be in favor once again. Between May and June alone, at least five notable releases — Invincible Universe: Battle Beast #1, Exquisite Corpses #1, Adventure Time #1 Deluxe Edition, We’re Taking Everyone Down with Us #3, and the facsimile edition for DC’s Adventure Comics #210 — feature polybagged versions, and Punisher: Red Band #1 will soon join them. Even more incredibly, three of those were released on a single day, something that underlined just how prominent this tactic has become once again.

That surge made me wonder: Are polybags back?

The answer to that questions depends on who you ask, mostly because some were skeptical that they ever went anywhere to begin with.

“Did polybags ever leave?” Invincible Universe: Battle Beast writer Robert Kirkman asked in response.

“I’m not sure polybags ever fully went away,” Oni Press Publisher Hunter Gorinson added.

That was a common refrain, and for good reason. While polybags mostly died back in the early 2000s — as Gorinson put it, there “was a stigma on polybags as a vestige of the 1990s” — there was never a lack of notable examples of polybagged releases. There were a bevy of options from just the past decade plus, including Sex Criminals’ XXX covers, Marvel’s varying Red Band releases, The Walking Dead’s 15^th anniversary reprints, and even a 30^th anniversary edition of one of the biggest to ever do it in a Superman #75 reprint complete with a new polybag. Kirkman and Gorinson were right. Polybags were never gone; they were always there.

But it was always a trickle. Publishers dabbled, making them a special treat rather than a full meal. That was true for quite some time, but these days, it feels like a full-fledged return, especially given the heat surrounding some of them. But why are they back? What makes them appealing? And how much of it is a reflection of this unusual period of experimentation the direct market finds itself in? That’s what we’ll be looking at today, as we explore the surprising resurgence of polybags, which may not be back, but are definitely standing out once again.