A Short History of Garbage Pail Kids:

A Look at Three Periods of Development

     Who among those born in the early eighties, when Cabbage Patch Kids and the sickly grins on their bloated faces were found at every turn, does not remember the first time he set his young eyes upon Up Chuck, Adam Bomb, or some other member yet of that disgusting, subversive lot called The Garbage Pail Kids? A thrill it was in the truest sense – a piercing feeling and a sudden, touching that rebellious core that is in every boy – to see those trading cards! How proper it seemed to see the innocent dolls that everyone so adored made, in pictures, to vomit, to melt, or else to be a zombie or a mounted head! And yet how improper – the cards were held and traded only secretly, on the playground or after school, and with penalty, for the adults hated them, taking them away on sight and punishing their owners. Year after year, children delighted in these cards (and sorrowed at their confiscation), collecting one series after another. Yet those who are not of that time, or who have forgotten it, very likely do not know the great variety of Garbage Pail Kids, thinking them equal in worth and wit. But any look at them that is more than a glance reveals there to be three periods in the cards’ development – the early, the later, and the modern periods.

     As with many Ages, institutions, and people, so it was with Garbage Pail Kids – their early years were their best, being characterized by a creativity, artistry, and cleverness that would be neither surpassed nor reclaimed in later periods. In 1985, the Topps trading-card company made its first jab at the Cabbage Patch Kids, releasing the first series of Garbage Pail Kids on an America full of the dolls’ admirers – and what a jab it was! It did not bruise; it broke skin and spilled blood. Here were pictures of little devils, drawn with an unmistakable resemblance to Cabbage Patch dolls, doing and being subjected to the most tasteless things – Fryin’ Bryan was electrocuted, Drippy Dan was full of holes and leaking. And for three full years, until 1987, and through nine series, the cards were unrelenting and unequalled in their parody. This success in the cards’ early period is reflected in their dazzling creativity. The cards were new; they therefore bore no burden of expectation from fans that had developed a conception of what Garbage Pail Kids “were.” Thus ideas abounded – there was the obese Fat Matt, cross-dressing Dressy Jesse, the rotten zombie Dead Ted. Since no such concepts had been put forth before, the creators might move creatively in any direction.

     The artistry, too, of this early period set it apart from (and above) the other periods; it had soul. John Pound was the chief creator of the GPK-image – its cuteness that contrasted with its filth, – overseeing the design of the cards and drawing many of them, and remained in that role through the first nine series. And what drawings he made! Not only did the cards that Pound designed have the intangible and unmistakable soul, they were full of careful detail. Stinky Stan was not just a baby that happened to be a trashcan – his open head had an exquisitely rendered fish-skeleton poking out over its top, food juices running out of it, and a devious-looking cat gazing into it with an expression of hunger and delight. Toothy Ruthie did not simply have a gaping maw of oversized teeth – her teeth were riven with fissures, populated by smiling and burrowing worms, shaded to reflect various degrees of decay, or else carefully bandaged. Those are no hasty sketches. As much attention was paid in this early period to maintaining subtlety of concept as to maintaining subtlety of detail; the cards were cleverer then than they would ever be again. Witness the puns’ abounding in the simian Kim Kong, the drinking and smoking Nervous Rex, the sunburned, Coppertone-ad-parodying Ultra Violet; witness the cultural references in Blue Boy George, who parodied both the singer Boy George and Gainsborough’s Blue Boy painting, or else in Audio Augie, whose brains are blown from his ear as he, wearing the leather fashionable among the punk youths of the time, mimics those same youths’ music-listening tendencies by bearing a giant stereo on his shoulder. These concepts were developed lovingly and with some thought, showing both a deep enough knowledge of culture to lampoon it and a facility with subtle nomenclature. This first and golden age would not last, however.

     The later period of 1987 to 1989, which comprised series 10-15, while almost coeval with the early period, was yet a lesser one, having little of the creativity, artistry, or cleverness of its forerunner; it was the beginning of the golden age’s decline. One measure of the cards’ declining quality was their increasing plainness, the dimming of their inventive brilliance. It seems an inevitable thing. First, the sheer number of cards produced in the early period – over four hundred! – reduced the number of new ideas available. This is a simple statistical truth; either one can choose from among the few remaining ideas of lesser worth, or one can recycle used concepts. Thus there were many cards depicting characters as composed of trash or of food (an early concept) and many cards that pushed the bounds of creativity only weakly and without effect (like Lee Tree, a boy with branches growing out of him). Second, Garbage Pail Kids had grown popular; with the demand for them so high, greater precedence was given not to refinement, but to production. A graver blow to the cards’ quality, however, came from a dilution of their once-potent artistry; this blow was a double one. First, the makers of Cabbage Patch Kids successfully lobbied to have all future GPK cards made to have no resemblance to the dolls. Since much of the cards’ humor (and artistic inspiration) depended on a visual parody now forbidden, the artists were suddenly directionless; when they did find a course again, it led to a new, foreign, and ultimately toothless style. The graver part of the blow was John Pound’s leaving; with him left the cards’ quirkiness and attention to detail. Whereas under Pound an “All-Wet Walt,” a boy whose toilet wets him preemptively, would have stood in a dim, grimy stall full of graffiti, puddles, and bugs, under the new style Walt stood… in a mere stall. A yellow one, if that counts as detail. How sterile! The last and most tragic characteristic of the later GPK-period is the coarseness of its humor; no longer was there the subtle wordplay found in “Otto Whack,” whose body parts were attached each in an incorrect place, or “Delicate Tess,” a smiling infant hung amid sides of butchered meat. Rather, the humor depended on the disgusting, whether bodily functions (the vomiting Squirtin’ Burton and ten others like him) or revolting situations (as with Lean Jean, who cranks her bottom half through a meat grinder). Of course, the early series were no stranger to the use of the disgusting for laughs – they just had no sole dependence on it.

     One sees in the modern period of 2004 to the present – the least inspired of them all – a simple, if magnified, continuation of the later period’s trends; in creativity, cleverness, and artistic merit alike, it is its forerunner’s inferior. The first two periods of GPK-history ran in unbroken succession, through fifteen series, from 1985 to 1989; only fifteen years later did the series resume production, after children of the 1980s had let enough years pass between the present and the decade of their youth. This resumption was, really, thus occasioned by a first wave of 80s nostalgia encompassing all popular culture of that decade – Topps must have seen the revival of their trading cards as good business. Therefore, because any artistry in the new cards was secondary to concerns of profit, creativity suffered. How could it not have done so? A company, when it attempts to make profit through a passing trend, can produce either in quantity or in quality, but not both. Topps chose quantity. Hence the concepts found in the modern period are nothing new, but mere repetition, with minor modification, of the old – more characters popping pimples or vomiting. Further, John Pound’s leaving after the early period and the Cabbage Patch Kids-lawsuit, both of which unfavorably reshaped the manner and direction of the art in the later-period cards, continued to influence the modern cards’ style – it is bland, spare, and even slapdash. While a card of the third series would have had both detailed characters and backgrounds full of small sight-gags (as with the craterous moon behind Eerie Eric the werewolf, or the bones, pebbles, bats, and roots around him) a modern card has none of the latter – just… a flimsy concept given sterile rendering. Backgrounds seem composed as an afterthought, being usually solid colors. Finally, and just as tragically as in the later period, the modern series stand apart from their predecessors in their decadence into bathroom-humor; and here it is a longer fall and more painful, for it hits a bottom. What cleverness in naming that abounded in the early period (Shrunken Ed) and might appear at times in the later (as with Sunken Trevor, a boy whose attachment to a cinder block by his tongue keeps him on a seabed) is now gone; there is nothing better than “Hosed Jose.” Moreover, what began in the early period as an alternate form of humor, the “gross-out,” progressed to become first a crutch, and then here, in the modern period, an addiction; nearly every card involves some sort of bodily excretion. No one who saw the Garbage Pail Kids at their height can help but regret this change.

     Yet change, if one considers it well, is inevitable in all things; its coming to parodical trading cards should seem no stranger than its coming to flesh, to mind, or to institution. Nor should one dwell on the change overmuch or immoderately; the impact the cards first had – stirring young hearts, stripping the royal cloak from the reigning Cabbage Patch dolls with a satirical hand – is not diminished by their later mediocrity. Those who felt that first impact (specific and culturally bound as it was) know its memory to be inviolable. One might even, stepping back a bit, consider the later mediocrity impartially and with a measure of black humor, even calling it useful – so profound are the differences between the three periods of the Garbage Pail Kids cards that their classification, for those who are minded to undertake it, is all the easier. That is some small thing to grasp onto.