From Superworld to the Marvel Super Heroes RPG, from TSR. Specifically the Gamer’s Handbook to the Marvel Universe.

These four books hold a very special place for me. The handbook is a time capsule of Marvel’s comic book universe, circa 1988, cataloging all its glory and ridiculousness, and translating them into statistics for a pretty crummy RPG (that I own a lot of material for, regardless of its quality). You’ve got classic characters and obscure. You’ve got detailed biographies. They’re amazing books if you can find them.

I will likely only include the first volume of the core four in this project since, sadly, my other three volumes lack the covers. But look at that Captain America collage! Have you ever seen a better Red Skull? Jeffrey Butler has done some comic book work, but he was a TSR staff artist at the time and I think that injected something distinctly un-Marvel about the art here that I find appealing. The interior art is all taken from the in-house handbook Marvel was producing for comic readers – the illustrations are credited to the Marvel Bullpen.