A few years ago at San Diego Comic-Con, I watched a documentary on Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, custom car builder and creator of the anti-Mickey Mouse character, Rat Fink. An interesting bit of trivia that I learned from the movie is that Ed Roth converted to Mormonism in the '70s and he settled in the same quaint farm town where I got married. My wife didn't get as much as I did from the movie, and that's okay, it may just be a guy thing. I'm adding this DVD (pictured) to my wish list on the right sidebar below. As kids, my middle brother and I owned T-shirts and model kits with Rat Fink on them. In the '80s, this counterculture art was probably an influence for the posters which covered my bedroom wall, skateboarders wearing gas masks over green spiky hair with nuclear warning symbols on their clothes. Of course, it was all to bother parents but I personally liked the cartoonish look mixed with hot rod detailing and monster mania - animated yet refined yet horrific. I've referred to Rat Fink before (see my 9/17/08 post) to make a connection between my first comic book purchase and a recent book I saw called
The Original Art of Basil Wolverton. It turns out there's also a connection between that comic and the monster card pictured below. Not only were they released the same year, which I never realized until now, but their style and content are similar as well.
Back before my middle brother and I got paper routes, the only money we could scrape together came from doing odd jobs around the house for nickels and dimes. The only things we could buy with that change were individually wrapped candies and maybe some baseball cards. I marvel to think that our parents trusted us to walk roughly five or six blocks to buy junk at the nearest little gas station, by ourselves, at the tender age of seven or eight. Granted, it was a different era, but I can't imagine my son even walking across the street to our neighborhood grocery store alone. I'm babbling here, but my point is that this gas station carried Awesome! All-Stars Stickers & Bubble Gum (pictured) and Baseball's Greatest Grossouts (both 1988 by Leaf). It was a natural extension from Rat Fink and it preceded my brother's foray into real baseball card collecting.
I never really got into sports cards, but a year after the monster baseball cards, I got Topps
Batman Series 2 movie cards and then a year after that I got the
Dick Tracy set. The Topps company made another line of cards that rivaled sports cards, movie cards and even Garbage Pail Kids - Wacky Packages, which parody the packaging of different consumer products like you'd find in a grocery store. They were kinda Pop Art, albeit with a grotesque twist. Who knows what Andy Warhol thought of them? Last year I bought a hardcover book collecting pictures of all the Series 1 through Series 7 (from 1973 and 1974) cards and celebrating the 35th anniversary of Wacky Packages. Up until then, I had always assumed that Wacky Packages were first introduced along with Garbage Pail Kids, but it turns out that the latter was only possible because of the success of the former from the decade prior. Another bit of trivia that I learned from the book is that the creators of Wacky Packages were devotees of
MAD magazine (so the comic-card connection comes full circle). In 2004 they started them up again (pictured) and there have been six series since then. I have card sleeves in "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post) protecting all the cards I've managed to save from each of the series mentioned here.
A few years ago at San Diego Comic-Con, I watched a documentary on Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, custom car builder and creator of the anti-Mickey Mouse character, Rat Fink. An interesting bit of trivia that I learned from the movie is that Ed Roth converted to Mormonism in the '70s and he settled in the same quaint farm town where I got married. My wife didn't get as much as I did from the movie, and that's okay, it may just be a guy thing. I'm adding this DVD (pictured) to my wish list on the right sidebar below. As kids, my middle brother and I owned T-shirts and model kits with Rat Fink on them. In the '80s, this counterculture art was probably an influence for the posters which covered my bedroom wall, skateboarders wearing gas masks over green spiky hair with nuclear warning symbols on their clothes. Of course, it was all to bother parents but I personally liked the cartoonish look mixed with hot rod detailing and monster mania - animated yet refined yet horrific. I've referred to Rat Fink before (see my 9/17/08 post) to make a connection between my first comic book purchase and a recent book I saw called The Original Art of Basil Wolverton. It turns out there's also a connection between that comic and the monster card pictured below. Not only were they released the same year, which I never realized until now, but their style and content are similar as well.
Back before my middle brother and I got paper routes, the only money we could scrape together came from doing odd jobs around the house for nickels and dimes. The only things we could buy with that change were individually wrapped candies and maybe some baseball cards. I marvel to think that our parents trusted us to walk roughly five or six blocks to buy junk at the nearest little gas station, by ourselves, at the tender age of seven or eight. Granted, it was a different era, but I can't imagine my son even walking across the street to our neighborhood grocery store alone. I'm babbling here, but my point is that this gas station carried Awesome! All-Stars Stickers & Bubble Gum (pictured) and Baseball's Greatest Grossouts (both 1988 by Leaf). It was a natural extension from Rat Fink and it preceded my brother's foray into real baseball card collecting.
I never really got into sports cards, but a year after the monster baseball cards, I got Topps Batman Series 2 movie cards and then a year after that I got the Dick Tracy set. The Topps company made another line of cards that rivaled sports cards, movie cards and even Garbage Pail Kids - Wacky Packages, which parody the packaging of different consumer products like you'd find in a grocery store. They were kinda Pop Art, albeit with a grotesque twist. Who knows what Andy Warhol thought of them? Last year I bought a hardcover book collecting pictures of all the Series 1 through Series 7 (from 1973 and 1974) cards and celebrating the 35th anniversary of Wacky Packages. Up until then, I had always assumed that Wacky Packages were first introduced along with Garbage Pail Kids, but it turns out that the latter was only possible because of the success of the former from the decade prior. Another bit of trivia that I learned from the book is that the creators of Wacky Packages were devotees of MAD magazine (so the comic-card connection comes full circle). In 2004 they started them up again (pictured) and there have been six series since then. I have card sleeves in "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post) protecting all the cards I've managed to save from each of the series mentioned here.
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