Kids these days go to public schools sponsored by Coca-Cola, eat cafeteria lunches from McDonald’s, and (in Vernon Hills, anyway) play football on Rust-Oleum Field. Looks like the time is right for the reintroduction of the Wacky Packages, the classic trading cards Topps has released off and on since 1967. Boomers and Gen-Xers will remember Wacky Packs as the product-parodies that turned Crest toothpaste into Crust, the toothpaste for those who only brush twice a month, or Gravy Train dog food into Grave Train (“Your dog will never eat anything else . . .”). Painted in spot-on detail and cut into the shapes of the products themselves, Wacky Packs stickers became instant graffiti for 70s kids.
“When you live in a consumer culture,” says Spiegelman, who’s not involved with the current series, “it’s really the most ambient part of the adult world you’re exposed to outside of the quirks of your own family. Anything that gives you another take on that is going to be attended to.”
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Lynch, whose comic strip with Gary Whitney, Phoebe and the Pigeon People, ran in the Reader in the late 70s and 80s, started working on Wacky Packs in ’68, when he was recruited by Spiegelman, who’d known him since they were teenage contributors to Joe Pilati’s comics zine Smudge.
That generation of underground cartoonists was generally getting spot work in men’s magazines like Dude and Gent rather than jobs at the mainstream publishers of comics like Spider-Man, Batman, or Archie. But there was work at Topps–Spiegelman had been there since graduating from high school. For more than two decades he developed card lines like Wacky Packages and the Garbage Pail Kids, while also working on his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Maus and publishing Raw with wife Francoise Mouly (now the New Yorker’s art editor) in later years.
Spiegelman and Lynch drew up colored roughs. Then the art was handed over for lettering and painting to one of the unsung geniuses of the American pop underground, Norman Saunders, a pulp fiction and comic book cover artist who’d been working since the 30s. He was a veteran of the he-man adventure magazines of the 60s, the kind with “exposes” like “Suckers Are My Meat–the B-Girl in Action.”
The new series of Wacky Packs, produced by Lynch with artists John Pound, Tom Bunk, Strephon Taylor, and Norm Saunders’s daughter Zina (Norm died in 1989), ranges from the satirical to the utterly silly. The Disney-esque mascot for Peter Pan peanut butter becomes Peter Panhandle, a drunk slumped on the sidewalk with a bottle of hooch. “Will work for peanuts,” says the sign hanging around his neck. Hormel’s corned beef hash is now Gormel’s Scorned Beef Hash, which promises “15 oz. of dead tormented flesh.” York Peppermint Patties are Dork Peppermint Pottys–chocolate-covered candy toilet seats.
Many of the mom-and-pop candy stores Wacky Packs flew out of in the 70s don’t exist anymore. So now more than ever Topps is sending Wacky Packages into the maw of the consumer machine itself. Box sets of the new edition sold through Wal-Mart and Target stores contain special bonus titles unavailable elsewhere. But in today’s product-placement playground, it might still be a good idea to move Wacky Packs from recess to required reading.
