Wacky Packages were produced between 1967 to 1994. This book is a tribute to Topps and all those behind this historic card series.

Featuring humorous and often grotesque parodies of common household brands like Windaxe cleaner and Smoochers jam, this creative collection of illustrations offers a tongue-in-cheek critique of consumer culture.

Wacky Packages--a series of collectible stickers featuring parodies of consumer products and well-known brands and packaging--were first produced by the Topps company in 1967, then revived in 1973 for a highly successful run. In fact, for the first two years they were published, Wacky Packages were the only Topps product to achieve higher sales than their flagship line of baseball cards. The series has been relaunched several times over the years, most recently to great success in 2007. Known affectionately among collectors as "Wacky Packs," as a creative force with artist Art Spiegelman, the stickers were illustrated by such notable comics artists as Kim Deitch, , Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, and Norm Saunders. This first-ever collection of Series One through Series Seven (from 1973 and 1974) celebrates the 35th anniversary of Wacky Packages and is sure to amuse collectors and fans young and old.

Take a fun look back at Quacker Oats, Blisterine, and more classic packaging parodies—plus an interview with creator Art Spiegelman! Known affectionately among collectors as “Wacky Packs,” the Topps stickers that parodied well-known consumer brands were a phenomenon in the 1970s—even outselling the Topps Company’s baseball cards for a while. But few know that the genius behind it all was none other than Art Spiegelman—the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novelist who created Maus. This treasury includes an interview with Spiegelman about his early career and his decades-long relationship with the memorabilia company—as well as a colorful compendium that will bring back memories of such products as Plastered Peanuts, Jail-O, Weakies cereal, and many more. Illustrated by notable comics artists Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, Norm Saunders, and more, this collection is a visual treat, a load of laughs, and a tribute to a beloved product that’s been delighting kids (and adults) for decades.

Covers Wacky Packages from Die Cuts through the original 16 series.

A complete narrative history of the weird and wonderful world of Underground Comix! In the 1950s, comics meant POW! BAM! superheroes, family-friendly gags, and Sunday funnies, but in the 1960s, inspired by these strips and the satire of MAD magazine, a new generation of creators set out to subvert the medium, and with it, American culture. Their “comix,” spelled that way to distinguish the work from their dime-store contemporaries, presented tales of taboo sex, casual drug use, and a transgressive view of society. Embraced by hippies and legions of future creatives, this subgenre of comic books and strips often ran afoul of the law, but that would not stop them from casting cultural ripples for decades to come, eventually moving the entire comics form beyond the gutter and into fine-art galleries. Author Brian Doherty weaves together the stories of R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Harvey Pekar, and Howard Cruse, among many others, detailing the complete narrative history of this movement. Through dozens of new interviews and archival research, Doherty chronicles the scenes that sprang up around the country in the 1960s and ’70s, beginning with the artists’ origin stories and following them through success and strife, and concluding with an examination of these creators’ legacies, Dirty Pictures is the essential exploration of a truly American art form that recontextualized the way people thought about war, race, sex, gender, and expression.

A lively exploration into America’s preoccupation with childhood innocence and its corruption In The Drinking Curriculum, Elizabeth Marshall brings the taboo topic of alcohol and childhood into the limelight. Marshall coins the term “the drinking curriculum” to describe how a paradoxical set of cultural lessons about childhood are fueled by adult anxieties and preoccupations. By analyzing popular and widely accessible texts in visual culture—temperance tracts, cartoons, film, advertisements, and public-service announcements—Marshall demonstrates how youth are targets of mixed messages about intoxication. Those messages range from the overtly violent to the humorous, the moralistic to the profane. Offering a critical and, at times, irreverent analysis of dominant protectionist paradigms that sanctify childhood as implicitly innocent, The Drinking Curriculum centers the graphic narratives our culture uses to teach about alcohol, the roots of these pictorial tales in the nineteenth century, and the discursive hangover we nurse into the twenty-first.