1997 Metal Universe Precious Metal Gems PMG Red Kobe Bryant /100 #81 PSA AUTH

Would iconic SkyBox cards such as this 1997 Metal Universe Red Precious Metals Gems Kobe Bryant exist had the Fleer Corporation not developed Razzles candy 30 years earlier? When graphic designer Jean MacLeod began her career at the Fleer Corporation, she primarily designed packaging in the company’s candy division, but her innovative redesign of the Razzles wrapper in the early 1990s caught the attention of more than consumers. “Once the CEO saw that Razzles package,” MacLeod recalled, “he said, ‘I want her to design the next card set.’” Several years into her 11-year run with the company, she combined her eye for design with forward-thinking minds in upper management to reimagine what a 3½-by-2½-inch trading card could look like and brought collectors a whirlwind of unique concepts still beloved to this day. Frank H. Fleer founded the Fleer Corporation in 1885, and the company found significant success with the launch of the famed Dubble Bubble gum in 1928, the first pink bubble gum. Five years earlier, Fleer had printed its first set of baseball cards, and while candy and gum drove most of the company's revenues over the next five decades, Fleer released a variety of sports and non-sports sets in that span. That included a basketball set in 1961—though Fleer did not produce another one until 1986, five years after becoming a mainstream baseball card manufacturer. While the company admirably competed with Topps, Upper Deck, and Donruss in the baseball card market and made football and hockey cards at the time, Fleer further emphasized its basketball products after Marvel acquired the company for $265 million in 1992. The following year, companies throughout the industry introduced super-premium cards (Fleer Flair, Topps Finest, Upper Deck SP, etc.), and parallels and inserts became prevalent in the industry. Fleer, however, had a built-in advantage with Marvel’s artists and illustrators in-house, giving it a roster of designers with a more diverse background than other trading card companies employed. “If you could take a design and make it pop by doing physical applications to the cardboard, that’s what really drove a set, from a design quality standpoint,” recalled Jeff Massien, who served as Fleer’s President and COO in the early 1990s and coined the company’s internal “Different by Design” slogan. “You couldn’t overdesign a card, as long as the player remained in the foreground. You can’t overglitz it. So, that’s what we did.” Marvel added SkyBox International to its trading card conglomerate in 1995, and that $150 million deal gave MacLeod and her late husband Earl Arena, a contracted designer, an avenue to push the boundaries of trading card design, harness their creative genius, and fully engage the Marvel illustrators. “Fleer was the more traditional sets, and SkyBox had the more technology and design-driven sets,” MacLeod said. “We were doing some of that stuff in the Fleer sets, but anything I tried to do in Fleer that was kind of wild, they said, ‘Let’s do that in SkyBox.’” Inserts based on Marvel’s galactic-style artwork occasionally popped up in the early ’90s, but with the go-ahead to try anything under the SkyBox umbrella, MacLeod and her team truly pushed the limits. When MacLeod wanted to infuse Marvel’s comic-style art onto every card in a base set, the Fleer Metal set morphed into SkyBox Metal Universe. She collaborated with a team of Marvel’s illustrators—including penciler Yancey Labat and CGI specialist Ken Southwick, who are credited on the flip side of Bryant’s 1997 Metal Universe card—to create a cosmic 125-card set with unique foil etchings behind cut-out action photos of the NBA’s top talents. Because each card featured its own foil pattern, the set required a detailed printing process with 123 die presses, one for each non-checklist card. When considering the set’s Precious Metal Gems parallels, MacLeod knew the most economical path would include reusing the dies. But how could she make the cards pop? Because she is left-handed, MacLeod saw her engagement ring when working on physical sketches, and that ring—which sports an emerald, her birthstone and favorite gem—helped lead to one of the most iconic sets from the decade. “We said, ‘Let’s do something that as soon as you open that pack, you would know it’s not like the base card. We really wanted you to know you got something special,” MacLeod said. “My engagement ring is an emerald, so when we were picking the foils, and I knew it was called Precious Metal Gems, I thought, ‘I’ll do an emerald color because it’s my favorite, and a ruby to match it.’” MacLeod washed out the backgrounds of PMGs with magnificent green and red foil. For the basketball set, the first ten cards in the production run feature green foil, while the remaining 90—such as this example of Bryant’s card, have red foil. Because the foil bleeds to all four edges, PMGs are prone to chipping, making high-grade examples tough to locate. But with an exciting action image of a young Kobe dishing a pass and a pleasing color balance between his gold Lakers jersey and the red foil, any example of this coveted PMG draws collectors’ attention. The certification number on this card has been checked against the third-party grader's online database and is active as of 07/08/2025.