Blast From the Past

I knew my sweetheart was going to bring me something cool back from her Seattle trip, but I had no idea it would be a dream deferred since 1985. Just outside the Pike Place Market, in a small comic shop, Jane found several packets of the newly-resurrected Garbage Pail Kids sticker packs. For those with hazy memories of 1980s cultural trends, back in the heyday of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze (I actually received one that first Christmas, although I don't recall asking for it - Tyler Bo, I think?), the wonderfully subversive folks at Topps released a series of trading cards in which the dimpled puttis were reproduced in various states of destruction, decay and woe. I later found out that the great Art Spiegelman, poised to gain eventual renown as the creator of the graphic novel Maus, was an original instigator of the Garbage Pail Kids series, after stumbling upon the idea in one of many variations on the legendary Wacky Packages series - see here for an image of the original prototype for what would become the GPKs. An eventual lawsuit forced Topps to alter the cartoon images so they were not so explicitly obvious as Cabbage Patch Kids parodies, and the series dwindled after releasing fifteen sets.

But all I remember in the days of 1985 and 1986 was how cool they seemed. My cousin arrived for the summer from South Dakota bearing the entire first and second series, with stickers peeled off and loving affixed to the pages of a small notebook. I remember spending literal hours giggling over them, whether poolside or on the living room floor. My cousin whispered to me that schools were banning them from recess yards and confiscating them from student desks.

My parents discussed the matter, and determined the Garbage Pail Kids were too morally depraved for me to own. I was allowed to glance at my cousin's growing collection, but told not to ask for any at the grocery store check out. Eventually, my cousin returned home to Sioux Falls, and my one lifeline to cultural sedition was snuffed out. My only recourse was to recreate them myself, using pen and colored pencil. Many a summer afternoon was spent in the basement, painstakingly drafting knock-offs of knock-offs. I believe I even created them using sticky paper so the images could be peeled off, just as in the original Topps line. It was a decent fix for a jonesing child, but I still craved the real stuff - when the family at the "trashy house" a few doors down tossed a couple Garbage Pail Kids cards into my trick-or-treat pumpkin bag, I had shivers of excitement. I hid them in my bedroom closet to ward off any chance of parental confiscation, and peeked at them throughout the day.

Of course, one can find the entire arsenal of Garbage Pail Kid images online today, through several archive websites. And the new series seems a little more reliant upon vomit and snot imagery than the originals (which always depended heavily on the gross-out for their impact, but also used more sly methods). But ripping open the packs to rifle through the cards is something I've waited over twenty years for. I won't say the wait was worth it, but UMBILICAL COREY and SMELLY SALLY brought a smile to my day nonetheless.