Tarot Decks in Marvel Comics

Do any of you here reads comic books? I’m in my 40’s now, and I recently found a new love for comic books and graphic novels! In my youth, I never read comics. I was more into prose books and encyclopedia. I started being interested by the occult, magic, sorcery and tarot at 13 years old, in 1993. I started reading comics after I saw the Doctor Strange movie in 2016, I loved every minutes of it, particularly the quick references to the chakras and the auras, and all the mysticism of what we call magick. So, that movie picked my interest in Doctor Strange comics (and many others), and during the last 5 years, I bought lots of them and saw many iterations of the tarot in the pages of various Marvel comics. Here a few of them:

Marvel Team-Up #76 (Dec 1981)

The cover shows a Marvel-Inspired clone of a RWS tarot deck, but inside the pages, they used actual cards of the RWS. Doctor Strange even does a classic Celtic Cross spread!

In this issue, Doctor Strange uses what he calls the ‘First Tarot Deck’. This one is clearly a RWS clone, using Marvel characters as figures on the cards. Reversed cards seems to be a favorite amongst Marvel writers, they keep popping up all the time!

Secret Defenders #1 (March 1993)

The Marvel Tarot (Aug 2007)

In this one, the sorcerer Ian McNee looks through the First Tarot Deck, divining who appears on each card, and looking into their origins to see why. He discovered several cards are displaying more than one individual at different times, a sign he feels verifies that the world’s magic is broken. This book is amazing! It’s not a comic book, but a special issue with actual information of each cards, with correspondences.

Mystic Arcana – Magik #1 (Aug 2007)

A direct sequel to The Marvel Tarot, in this one. Knowing that the tarot was created around 1442, I know that is very anachronistic! This scene is in 11th Century BCE – Illyana Nikolievna Rasputina (aka Magik) travels back in Ancient Egypt with Mirage and joins Ashake to fight against Heka-Nut. They clearly use tarot deck with a Egyptian theme. Again, being a Marvel story, they can do whatever they want history-wise. Perhaps, in the Marvel universe of Earth-616, tarot cards did originates from the Ancient Egypt…

Mystic Arcana – Sister Grimm #1 (Aug 2007)

This comic is the conclusion of the story started with The Marvel Tarot, which include 4 issues (Magik, Black Knight, Scarlet Witch, Sister Grimm). This issue use a classic RWS.

Avengers/Defenders: Tarot #1-4 (Jan-Mar 2020) 

Last year, the tarot came back in a mini-series! That magical deck glows, and when the bad guy cut the cards in two, and mix them together, the heroes are mixed-up creating interesting variants. 1/2 Doctor Strange mixed with 1/2 Silver Surfer become ‘Doc Surf’, 1/2 Scarlet Witch mixed with 1/2 Doctor Strange become ‘Scarlet Strange’, etc.

Defenders vol. 6 #1 (Aug 2021)

And then, this week, is the release of a new Defenders title, showing a lot of tarot cards, again inspired by the good old RWS! The story start with a classic RWS imagery, but then is magically altered, and the figures and yet again replaced by characters from the Marvel universe. I love that the writer made his research for the meanings of the cards.

That’s all for now! I collects all types of comics, and I’ll probably dig into my other indie books, or the Hellboy series, and see if I can find interesting panels with tarot cards.