Wacky Packages

When I was a lad of about 12 a fad swept our school. It was a series of stickers called Wacky Packages, which were Mad Magazine-like parodies of every day brand name products put out by Topps, who also put out baseball cards and Bazooka gum. When I collected them, about 1973 or 1974, the circle I ran with was fanatical about them. Rumors would spread about which stores had the new series, and we would rush to some out-of-the-way party store after school on our bikes to buy them before they sold out. Then we'd apply the stickers to our notebooks like trophies.

Now there's a book out that allows me to relive those days. It's called a coffee-table book, but it's kind of compact to be called such. On each page, in full color as if they were frescoes by Raphael, are each sticker from the '73 and '74 series. As additional touches, some stickers are included inside, and the dust jacket is printed on that same kind of waxy paper that enveloped each pack back in the day.

The only text is an introduction by Art Spiegelman and an afterword by Jay Lynch. Spiegelman, who is a respected comic historian as well as the author of Maus, was a teenage kid when he was taken on by Topps in the mid-sixties, and he was on the ground floor of Wacky Packages. Many of the artists were employed by Mad, and the humor was in that vein, a kind of low-common denominator punning that was so appealing to kids on the brink of puberty. Most of them dealt with filth or decomposition, with worms a popular trope. Just opening the book at random, I see Hungry Jerk pancake mix, Choke King Chinese food, Fang breakfast drink for vampires, Milk-Foam brand dog toothbrush. You get the idea.

Leafing through this book today, there are no genuine laughs generated by the material. All that it does is infuse a guy my age with a glow of nostalgia for what was good about the seventh-grade (and there wasn't much). Now someone needs to do a book about Odd Rods and Silly Cycles.