Waaaayyyyyy back in 1985, when I was in 7th grade, my friends (well, the dudes I sat with in art class) and I started this sort of club called Cabbage Patch Killers, which was born out of distaste for Cabbage Patch Kids. This led to us spending an inordinate amount of class time drawing pictures of Cabbage Patch Kids in various forms of mutilation, like slashed to pieces by Freddy Krueger or flattened with tire marks across them where they had been run over in the street. We thought we were so clever. It also occurs to me that my art teacher in 7th grade really didn't pay any attention to us whatsoever.
So imagine the mind-blowing moment when another kid in class (not a member of the GPK) brought in a stack of garbage Pail Kids cards! We instantly decided that we were all geniuses and had our thumbs firmly upon the pulse of the American satirical zeitgeist.
Needless to say, I spent the next couple of years collecting Garbage Pail Kids cards like there was no tomorrow. And here's five of them that always stuck in my head...
1. Jay Decay - In many ways, this one was probably my number one favorite. Zombies are awesome and the artwork on this one is stunning.
2. Reese Pieces - This one will forever stick into my memory because this is the card most given to me by other people. So many kids in my school thought that they were the first person to put together the fact that my name (although spelled differently) was the same name on this card. Eventually I would end up with about a 3 inch tall stack of nothing but this card.
3. Roy Bot - Part little kid doll, part transformer. All Awesome.
4. Savage Stuart - Even back in 7th grade, I was a massive Conan fan and this card always reminded me of my favorite Son of Cimmeria. Crom!
5. Charlotte Web - Sometimes known as "Didi T", this card was always one of my favorites due to the sheer horror I felt when I thought of a giant black widow spider with a human baby face. *shudder*
That's it for this week! Another Top 5 list will be posted next Friday!
I had Jay Decay on one of my high school notebooks :D
ReplyDeleteFunny, I was just flippin' through my old cards. They are so ratty, i carried them back and forth to school every day. I had most of these at one time or another. 80's gold!
ReplyDeleteYou should sue. Someone obviously invented a remote mind-reading apparatus and used it to pilfer your 7th grade creativity.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone has a remote mind reading apparatus and aims it at a seventh grade boy, then more power to them if they get through all the images of boobs and on to something of substance.
DeleteWell, in all fairness, our idea was rather different (we just made drawings of Cabbage Patch Kids all bloody and mutilated). And boobs was just the first level of my 7th grade brain. After that came skateboards, then ninja weapons, then Ghostbusters quotes, then Rubik's Cube algorithms, then anything remotely resembling substance.
DeleteJay Decay scared the piss out of me as a kid. I had the poster that showed all the Kids and I actually blacked out his image with a marker. It would be decades before my love of zombies was born from this earlier terror.
ReplyDeleteDoes it sound weird that I found (find) a lot of GPK artwork eerily beautiful? There are some really stunning images in the first few series that are genuinely great pieces of art.
Jay Decay was a favorite of mine "Back In The Day" too.
ReplyDelete