I'm 35, which means I was a kid of the '80's, which means I collected Garbage Pail Kids cards (or stickers? whatever). I probably haven't even thought about this Mad Magazine-esque parody of Cabbage Patch Kids in a couple of decades, but now Topps has unleashed the floodgates of sentimentality with the publication of this book, which catalogs the first five series of GPK cards.
Now that I've had a chance to immerse myself in nostalgia for a few minutes, there are two things I specifically recall about my personal experience collecting Garbage Pail Kids. The first memory is of a fifth grade classmate (I think his name was Scott), who wore the same grubby, tattered flannel shirt to school everyday, and would sell packs of GPK cards during recess. I remember having a sneaking suspicion that Scott had just saved the wax wrappers (wax packs!) from packs he had bought, and repackaged all the cards he already had or didn't want, and then sold them at a discount to his gullible classmates. Now that I think of it, I think his last name was Zuckerberg.
The other GPK memory that comes to mind is the sheer elation I felt after opening a pack one day and flipping through the cards to find this:
After seeing all the more common names like Paul, Brian, Kelly, Scotty, and Amy, they had finally used my name. I had made it into the club!
Anyway, the other item of note with this book is the introduction by Art Spiegelman. Art is a legendary comic artist perhaps best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir Maus, about his parents' story of surviving the Holocaust (honestly, though, which do you think people are more familiar with, Maus or Garbage Pail Kids?).
Check out a slide show of some of the cards featured in the book, along with Spiegelman's commentary as part of this feature on Slate.com.
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