1940 Superman Card

Last week I posted a 1940 baseball card called Play Ball which was published by Gum, Inc. On the back of the card was a little blurb about their Superman cards. I said I wanted one. Well, now I have one.Since you can find anything on eBay, I looked and found several. This card isn't in bad shape. It is far from mint condition, mainly because the front is poorly centered. It's also yellowed and has some staining on the back. When I bid on this card, there were 4-5 other cards from this set which had been graded and slabbed. The bids for these were in the $100 to $300 range. There are only 2 up for bid as I write this. I paid about $10 for this card.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, most of my allowance money went to comic books. The choice was between Marvel and DC comics. While I like some Marvel titles (mostly the more esoteric ones, like Iron Man and Dr. Strange), I really preferred DC comics. Superman, Batman, Flash, Justice League of America, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Aquaman, Superboy, Supergirl, etc. But Superman was always my favorite.

One piece of trivia I didn't know. According to Wikipedia, Gum, Inc. later became Bowman. Gum had to stop making trading cards after 1941 because of war shortages of paper and ink. When they came back in 1948, they were known as Bowman. Wikipedia doesn't say why this happened.

In 2003, Upper Deck produced a set called Play Ball which was clearly based on the 1940-41 Play Ball sets. I wonder why Upper Deck got rights to the name and design and not Topps?