Happy Monday to you! You want the goods? I’ve got the goods. Or, at the very least, a smattering of interesting ephemera. Let’s do this thing.
First and foremost, you may have noticed the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were announced. The BGHB Awards are some of the strangest in the biz since they encompass the nonexistent publishing year that extends from May to June. How are we to use such an award? No cash benefit is included. And traditionally it has been seen as either a litmus test for future book awards or as a way of rectifying past sins / confirming past awards. This year it’s a bit of a mix of both. Both 2015 and 2016 titles appear on the list. You can see the full smattering in full here or watch a video of the announcement here. And, for what it’s worth, I served on the committee this year, so if you’ve a beef to beef, lay it on me.
Since this news item appeared on Huffington Post I’m not sure if it is in any way true. If not, it’s still a lovely thought. According to HP, the cover artist of Sweet Valley High takes commissions. Just let that one sink in a little. I’m not interested, though. Call me when the cover artist of Baby-Sitters Club starts doing the same.
It’s odd that I haven’t linked to this before, but a search of my archives yields nothing. Very well. Whether or not you were aware of it, The Toast has The Giving Tree in their Children’s Stories Made Horrific series. Shooting fish in a barrel, you say? Not by half. It’s not a new piece. Came out three years ago, as far as I can tell. And yet . . . it’s perfect. The latest in the series, by the way, was a Frog and Toad tale. Sublime.
This Week in Broadway: Tuck Everlasting is out. Wimpy Kid is in.
In other news vaguely related to theater, Lin Manuel-Miranda is slated to star in a 2018 Mary Poppins musical sequel. And no, not on stage. On the silver screen. This, naturally, led to the child_lit listserv postulating over how this could be possible since P.L. Travers had a pretty strong posthumous grip on the rest of the Mary Poppins rights.
So I worked for New York Public Library for eleven years. Eleven years can be a lot of time. During my tenure I observed the very great highs and very low lows of the system. I like to think I knew it pretty well. Now here’s a secret about NYPL: They’re bloody awful at telling you about all the cool stuff they have going on. Always have been. For example, I’m tooling about the NYPL site the other day when I see this picture.
I stare at it. I squint at it. And finally I cannot help but come to a single solitary conclusion . . . that’s my old boss! There. On the left. Isn’t that Frank Collerius, branch manager of the Jefferson Market Branch in Greenwich Village? Yup. The Librarian Is In Podcast seeks to simply talk “about books, culture, and what to read next.” Frank co-hosts with RA librarian Gwen Glazer and they’re top notch. I haven’t made my way through all of them yet. I’m particularly interested in the BookOps episode since that’s where I used to work. And look! I had no idea that Shola at the Schomburg was on Sesame Street.
Howdy, libraries. How’s that STEM programming coming along? Care for some inspiration? Then take a gander at the blog STEM in Libraries where “a team of librarians with a passion for creating fun and engaging STEM programs for library patrons of all ages,” have so far created fifty-seven different STEM program ideas.
A helpful reader passed this on to me, so I pass it on to you: “The latest New Yorker magazine, dated June 6 and 13, may be of interest to you, if you haven’t yet seen it. It’s the Fiction issue, and in it are some essays by 5 authors, each subtitled “Childhood Reading”…with memories of the books, articles, package labels, events from their childhoods that shaped their idea of what reading is and can be. Having read a couple of these so far, I thought of you, and decided to mention them to you, in case you don’t regularly look at the New Yorker, and might not see them.” Thanks to Fran Landt for the link.
In other NYPL news, I miss desperately being a part of the 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing committee. Fortunately, the folks on the committee recently confessed to the books they’re finding particularly good. So many I haven’t see yet. To the library!
Daily Image:
You know who won the Best Bookmark Left in a Library Book Award the other day? That’s right. This guy. Check it out:
Sure beats finding bacon. I was forbidden to own these guys as a kid, so I’ve placed this little fellow in a prominent place on my desk. Who wants to bet money that some executive somewhere is trying to figure out how to bring these back? Let’s see . . . the last time they were made they were illustrated by Art Spiegelman. So if Pulitzer Prize winners are the only people who can draw them, my vote for the 21st artist goes to . . . ah . . . wait a minute. Maus is the only graphic novel to ever win a Pulitzer?!?
Last month, Wired posted an update about John Pound, the co-creator of the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, and how he uses somewhat archaic software to create random comics! Many comics cognoscenti know that Art Spiegelman created the Garbage Pails Kids concept, as well as that of Wacky Packages. What most don’t know is that […]
Friday, October 12 — Sunday, October 14th
Panels
Friday, October 12
Too Much Horror Business
Kirk Hammett, lead guitarist for Metallica,
talks to Kevin Clement about his passion
for collecting monster movie memorabilia
9:00–10:00 p.m. • 1A23
Sunday, October 14
Over 30 Years with Brian and Wendy Froud:
Faeries, Goblins, and Trolls
10:30–11:00 a.m. • Variant Stage
Sunda y, Oc tober 14
Getting Graphic with Girls:
Empowering Girls and Addressing Issues through
Paneled Pictures, with Cecil Castellucci, Colleen Venable,
Laura Lee Gulledge, Lucy Knisley, and Heidi MacDonald
4:00–5:00 p.m. • 1A01
Kirk Hammett signing Too Much Horror Business
11:45–12:45 p.m. • Autographing Table 5
Michael Goodwin signing Economix:
How Our Economy Works (and Doesn’t Work)
2:00–2:30 p.m. • Abrams ComicArts Booth 806
Derf Backderf signing My Friend Dahmer
3:00–3:30 p.m. • Abrams ComicArts Booth 806
Brian and Wendy Froud signing Trolls
12:00–1:00 p.m. • Autographing Table 5
In the 1980s, the Garbage Pail Kids trading cards were so notorious that they were banned from select schools (well, mine) and were traded and pored over like some back-alley dice game at lunch (well, mine again). I will never know what happened to my stack of GPK cards, but I no longer have to wistfully imagine what “Clogged Duane” and “Dinah Saur” looked like, thanks to the recently published Garbage Pail Kids by Abrams ComicArts.
Upon delivery, my nearest neighbor immediately asked to borrow the book. The 220-plus page hardcover instantly triggers a lost sense of dark nostalgia in those who were kids in the mid-1980s. This book collects every card from Series 1-5, and it includes a five-page introduction by Art Spiegelman and a two-page afterword by artist John Pound. The rest of the pages are all GPK. Note that the characters had “alternate” cards—same image, different name—and those names are listed at the bottom of every page. The back matter for the cards is not reproduced outside of the front end papers, but the dust jacket is the same material as the old card packaging—and underneath lies a recognizable image of the pink rectangular gum that came in every pack.
Punny highlights for me were “Babbling Brooke” and “Nervous Rex” (lowlight: “Hot Scott”). In retrospect, I do see some cause for concern (sorry, 1986 self!), notably the drug references, stereotyping, and overall bad taste (but never so bad as how that gum fared—once chewed, twice shy). This hindsight makes Garbage Pail Kids an even better read. How did The Topps Company get away with some of these—see “Half-Nelson” and “Stoned Sean,” for example? It’s a fascinating retrospective, and Spiegelman’s involvement in the original series somehow lends credibility to it all.
“Snot was a good idea (gross bodily fluids were a staple of Topp’s sophisticated brand of humor),” Spiegelman writes in the introduction. “We all worked anonymously, since Topps didn’t want the work publicly credited…I was annoyed at the time, but my book publisher, Pantheon, was very relieved. The first volume of Maus was being prepared for publication while the GPKs were near the height of popularity.”
Maus went on to earn a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and illustrator worked on the Garbage Pail Kids cards. You can say this aloud every time your neighbor asks to borrow your copy.
--Alex
As a longtime non-sports card collector, when the original series of Garbage Pail Kids stickers came out in 1985, I was delighted. I recall that the characters, a parody of those god-awful Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, was a hilarious spoof in the vein of Mad Magazine. The parodies even got funnier in the 2nd and 3rd series before I moved on. I haven’t looked at those stickers in years and my memory of the property has been tainted by the horrible 1987 CBS animated series – so awful it didn’t air for years (it was pulled at the last moment from the CBS Saturday morning line-up, allowing Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse to move into the coveted post Pee-Wee Herman time slot). I’ve embed a sample episode below for your viewing displeasure.
On April 1st, Abrams ComicArts will release a hardcover book featuring full page images of every card in the first 5 series (1985-86) of the popular Topps bubble gum stickers. At first, I didn’t think much about the idea of such a book, but after reading Art Spiegelman’s introduction, and John Pound’s afterword, then leafing through the pages I came to realize these hilarious pieces haven’t lost any of their subversive edge. Alternative (or Underground) cartoonists Spiegelman, Pound, Jay Lynch, Tom Bunk and Mark Newgarden were the brains behind these beauties. The art is way better than I remembered and I had a ball checking these out anew – they actually work great in the book format. It’s lavishly produced, with the book jacket looking like the original wrapper, and an actual set of Garbage Pail Kids stickers included inside. This tome goes on the shelf next to my Mad paperbacks, Kurtzman’s Hey Look and Crumb’s Fritz The Cat. Maybe the new animated movie in development by Michael Eisner and Pes doesn’t seem like such a bad idea after all. Check out what all the fuss is about (Amazon is selling it for $11.27 – a steal!). Highly recommended!
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Indie animator PES (pictured above) moved from New York to Los Angeles a couple years back to fulfill his ambition to become a feature film director. It didn’t take long. Deadline Hollywood broke the story this afternoon that PES has been tapped to direct a feature film based on the Eighties fad Garbage Pail Kids.
The news is significant, representing not only a career shift for PES—best known for animated shorts like Roof Sex and Western Spaghetti as well as a slew of award-winning TV commercials—but also because it heralds the return of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner to feature filmmaking (at least on the financing side). Deadline reported that “Michael Eisner’s The Tornante Company will finance and produce the development of a feature film. . .Eisner bought the card company in 2007 and this is his first feature spinoff project.” Michael Vukadinovich will write the script and Toby Ascher will produce.
While neither the name Eisner nor “Garbage Pail Kids” instill much confidence, the real story here is PES’s involvement. He has proven himself time and time again as a force for innovative graphic ideas. A quick browse of Cartoon Brew’s archives will reveal some of his creative storytelling abilities (as well as some of his contributions as a guest blogger). I’ll certainly be looking forward to see what PES does with his first feature film.
PES’s latest short Fresh Guacamole debuted on YouTube last week:
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Many thanks to Tom Richmond for alerting us that Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids artist Tom Bunk has a blog. He’s using the blog to showcase all sorts of things from his varied artistic output, including illustration work, and fine art. But it’s the work for an unpublished Topps trading card series called Loco-Motion that I’m loving.
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Tags: garbage pail kids, gross, Illustration, tom bunk, wacky packages
First and foremost, you may have noticed the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards were announced. The BGHB Awards are some of the strangest in the biz since they encompass the nonexistent publishing year that extends from May to June. How are we to use such an award? No cash benefit is included. And traditionally it has been seen as either a litmus test for future book awards or as a way of rectifying past sins / confirming past awards. This year it’s a bit of a mix of both. Both 2015 and 2016 titles appear on the list. You can see the full smattering in full here or watch a video of the announcement here. And, for what it’s worth, I served on the committee this year, so if you’ve a beef to beef, lay it on me.
We’ve been wondering about the Mary Poppins rights. I haven’t looked at any of the online discussion…just heard a lot of outraged ranting from my son!
What are those bookmarks ? I want to find some info on them as you really piqued my curiosity saying Art Spiegelman illustrated them !! Whoa !!
I had just talked my book club into reading The Lie Tree, so no beef on that pick.
Now if an aritst could put me on a Bailey School Kids cover, I’d be in. Or maybe a Choose Your Own Adventure…
Darn tootin’.
Ach. Twas a bonny, heartily disgusting fad of the mid 1980s. During the height of the Cabbage Patch Kids a series of cards was released called the Garbage Pail Kids. This is one of the tame ones. The bulk were gross in a variety of different ways. There was even a truly unfortunate movie. I was the right age at the right time. And yes, Mr. Spiegelman made them in the early days. The more you know, kids!
Oo! The possibilities are endless.
Children of the 1970s had Wacky Packages, also illustrated by Spiegelman. I know grown ups who will not part with them. Someone’s missing that book mark!