​ This web page is dedicated to Planet Studio Pins, that were made between 1987 and 1996.

  

  Planet Studios was created in 1987 and was sold in 2007.  Between 1987 and 1996 it created, what in my opinion, are some of the best pin's ever made.  The company was created by Elizabeth Barry, aka Libbey Saul.  She and her husband created comics pins, mainly Marvel, between 1988 and 1996. When in 1996 due to the comic market crash and Marvel wanting a bigger take of the revenue when sales all  around were falling and comic shops going under, they decided to get out of the comic business and just produce small butterfly and flower pins under Libbey's design's.  Libbey unfortunately died around 2000 and her husband sold the business around 2007.  This was a small family cottage industry, run in a private house by a wife and husband and maybe a few employees.

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​  They started doing just small well-designed hard enamel cloisonné pins, but also tried branching out towards other things like ear-rings, key rings, money clips and rings.  You can tell if it is a Planet Studio mainly by its size, back pattern, subject matter and date.  Most pins were of the super-heroes in dynamic poses, the early one normally featured the hero slightly off-centre within a box or a circle background.  Later pins featured more cropped figures with no background. 

 

I've found that the pins were produced mostly in two different ways, in the classic cloisonné hard enamel method but also a soft enamel type pin, which is a brass embossed stamped pin, which was then painted with one coat of enamel.  These soft enamels, painted pins are lower quality too and can be easily told apart by the lack of detail and the brass halo effect along the edge.  There are examples where the same subject has a pin in both classic cloisonné and painted. I'm unsure why they did this. Were they sold at two different prices?  The best description of the types to pin and the process of making them is from another pin / badge maker, Made By Cooper.  They also tried to diversify into small jewellery like ear-rings, key rings, money holders and even small pencil grips. 

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  Not all of their product was clearly marked with their copyright, and it never has of whom the character is.  This has led to some confusion over time, as some of the characters who featured, only appeared in a few issues and I have seen many mislabelled when sold.  I have noted the stamped copyright date on the back of all the pin scans I have made, but on some pins the date is so small I can barely read it.  So if you find a mistake about the pin date or anything else, please let me know, so I can change it.

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  I have to mention the cover pins.  I will only be listing a few of them on this site.  They were a brass blanks, with a safety pin back, about 3.5cm x 5cm, with a glued on paper reproduction of a recent cover.  They were made around 1991-1993 and were "limited editions" of 2500.  They don't last well.  Over time the colour fads and if left out on display becomes sun bleached.  They were mostly of 1st issues that had just come out like Spider-Man, Ghost Rider and the multiple X-Men issue #1 A to E covers.

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Recently (2025), an ex-worker at Planet, sent me an email detailing how the pins were made and produced.  Here's that email.

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"Also, a bit more info:

 

The thing with Planet Studios pins is that, as collectibles go, a very limited number of each was ever made. It was a mom-and-pop business, run out of their house, and they just happened to be very creative and utterly friendly people with a great manufacturing contact in China at the time. 

 

Aside from the later/cheaper blister pack series, most of their cloisonné/enamel designs were issued in numbers limited to a few hundred pieces, and the most popular issues probably never topped out at more than a couple thousand. It is also near certain that all the purported limited editions and sets of 1500 or so never reached that number of production. As a former employee I remember being told once to start numbering a stack of set cards in the mid-hundreds. 

 

Planet typically took orders in advance through Diamond Comics Distributors and then produced the minimum number of pins to meet the demand. They would keep any extra pins in inventory and send them out if the infrequent reorder appeared and didn’t often request another minimum production run of 250-300. Also, each time a pin was actually re-ordered, the manufacturer would create a new die, which means every re-issue is fundamentally different, sometimes quite noticeably. Often the colors would get changed as well, if even slightly. 

And some of the oldest pins were initially made in the traditional melted glass cloisonné style and when re-issued appeared in enamel. If there are small holes in the color, it’s more likely cloisonné; I learned this from the owner.

 

Regarding the more obscure independent issues, often the entire production run was sent directly to the comic creator for personal distribution and not offered to retail outlets. 

The Lisa Simpson pins, for instance, all went straight to Fox’s executive headquarters. The Mortal Kombat fighter figures are practically unknown. 

 

Occasionally, and mostly early in the Marvel series 001–393, samples of a design were ordered first and 6-8 of each would arrive featuring different metal platings and/or colors for the owners to choose between before going into final production. The samples not chosen for distribution are among the rarest of the rare. " 

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