It’s a mystery of the ages how Topps, Inc., the premier publisher and distributor of sports trading cards in the United States, got into the business of manufacturing stickers parodying branded consumer products. As unlikely as it was at the time, Wacky Packages became a very successful product line that surprised everyone.
Out of the turbulent 1960s, arose the great satire magazines, new comic book super heroes and music that inspired a generation. This counter-culture time embraced any ideas which talked of resistance and change. Mad Magazine, the irreverent publication created by EC Comics in the late 1950s, was at the forefront, leading the way to a new era in comic art expression. Artists emerged such as Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, who created Rat Fink and introduced everyone to his wild and wacky automotive art. Underground adult comix created by Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Barbara Mendez, Trina Robbins and others explored the exploits of a 1960s generation, that wasn’t interested in reading Superman, Captain America or Spiderman. It was a wacky time!
In 1967, Topps Inc, which produced sports trading cards for baseball, football and hockey decided they needed to get into the act. Thus Wacky Packages were born. These parodies of famous brands of food, household cleaning products, personal hygiene and other commercial products became the stuff of legend. It was said, that in 1973 Wacky Packages stickers outsold Topps’ biggest selling product, baseball cards.
Although many different cartoonists worked on the series of cards, the first series of stickers were primarily the work of Norm Saunders and Art Spiegleman. The stickers were 2.4’ x 3.5” (basically the same size as baseball cards) and were initially on a card, to be peeled off and licked like a postage stamp, so that they could be adhered.
By the early 1970s, the stickers had become slightly smaller, with a peel-off adhesive, mercifully replacing the lick-and-stick postage stamp glue of the earliest series. The wacky package releases of 1973-1976 usually contained 2 stickers, a puzzle piece, checklist card and a brittle piece of gum which most kids only chew if they were desperate. This was the Wacky Packages era that I fondly remember trading with my classmates, in an unspoken race to see who could complete the collection for that particular year.
Many fine illustrators and cartoonists contributed to the series of cards over the years, including: Norm Saunders, Art Spiegelman, Wally Wood, Kim Deitch, George Evans, Drew Friedman, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, Bhob Stewart, Tom Sutton, and even Robert Grossman. But the initial series of stickers were primarily the creative work of Norm Saunders and Art Spiegelman.
Norman Saunders was a prolific illustrator who made a good living painting cover art for pulp fiction magazines, paperbacks, and comic books. He made pocket change working for Topps repainting the uniforms for baseball players who were traded, so that an expensive photo shoot could be avaoided. In the early 1960s he worked on the notorious Mars Attacks collection of trading cards with the EC comic artist Wally Wood. For the time, they were as violent and explosive as the EC comic books which inspired them. EC comic artist Wally Wood also did rough out drawings for some of the first series of Wacky Packages, which Saunders would then paint.
Art Spiegelman worked for Topps for around 20 years as a staff artist and cartoonist. He was part of the creative team that produced Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids. Spiegelman’s greatest personal achievement was in the writing and illustration of Maus, a graphic novel which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. In it he memorably depicted Germans as cats, Jews as mice, and the Polish as pigs. Spiegelman continues his work as a cartoonist and teaches at The School of Visual Arts, in New York City.
