Tag Archives: Maus

Art Spiegelman on the Birth of Garbage Pail Kids

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These images come from Garbage Pail Kids, by the Topps Com­pany, a col­lec­tion of the first five series of the pop­u­lar par­ody cards. The text is excerpted from the intro­duc­tion by Pulitzer-winning car­toon­ist Art Spiegel­man, who worked on GPKs, as well as many other projects, in his 20 years work­ing for Topps.
I don’t think I even remem­bered that we had already done a Cab­bage Patch Kids par­ody called “Garbage Pail Kids” as part of an upcom­ing Wacky Pack­ages series, although Mark New­gar­den, who had been respon­si­ble for writ­ing and draw­ing a rough for it, brought out John Pound’s ren­der­ing. We took one sketch: a kid lit­er­ally going nuclear, with a mush­room cloud com­ing out of his head. It even­tu­ally became Adam Bomb (No. 8a). We knew from expe­ri­ence that if we could find two exam­ples, we could find 200. But if we could only come up with one, we were in trouble.
Maybe it was No. 29a, the skele­tal Bony Joanie, or maybe the kid climb­ing out of the toi­let bowl (potty humor, short of depict­ing actual turds, was a nat­ural) that became the sec­ond pro­to­type. One way or another, we stum­bled to the start­ing line and were on to some­thing that we could turn into a series.

Through­out, Len was the friendly voice of rea­son, say­ing, “No, you can’t show a tam­pon!” After a while we started to get punchy. We’d go into a trance try­ing to fig­ure out, say, what we could do with some poor kid’s ears that would be graph­i­cally com­pelling. Or how the kid would react to being stabbed. We’d have these ses­sions in which we would all sit around this tiny imitation-wood table in a small room with junk all around it, com­ing up with jokes about some­body crawl­ing out of a toi­let look­ing like he just ate something.

We all worked anony­mously, since Topps didn’t want the work pub­licly cred­ited, pre­sum­ably so we could eas­ily be replaced by other hands. 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 their popularity.

In 1986 it was chal­leng­ing enough to get peo­ple to accept the idea of a seri­ous work about the Holo­caust in comic-book form with­out hav­ing to reveal that the artist also cre­ated those noto­ri­ous stick­ers for the pre­pu­bes­cent set. “Please keep it quiet,” my edi­tor insisted. “If this gets out, they’ll review your book and call it ‘Garbage Pail Jews!’

”Even­tu­ally, Garbage Pail Kids became as big a phe­nom­e­non as Cab­bage Patch Kids. Garbage Pail Kids offered some­thing that was not so benign and parent-friendly; rather, it pro­voked: “Oh, my god, what is that? Where did you get those? Your allowance is cut off! And you’re grounded!”
The dolls were pricey and had to appeal to adults. The stick­ers were avail­able for chump change and appealed to the inner beast in all kids. This was Topps, after all.

Art Spiegelman on the Muhammad cartoons controversy

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Art Spiegel­man is an Amer­i­can comics artist, edi­tor, and advo­cate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book mem­oir, Maus amd Maus II and the Garbage Pail Kids.

In Sep­tem­ber 2004, he released “In the Shadow of No Tow­ers”, in which he relates his expe­ri­ence of the Twin Tow­ers attack and the psy­cho­log­i­cal after-effects.

In 2005, Time Mag­a­zine named Spiegel­man one of their “Top 100 Most Influ­en­tial People.”

In the June 2006 edi­tion of Harper’s mag­a­zine, he pub­lished the arti­cle ‘Draw­ing blood: Out­ra­geous car­toons and the art of out­rage’ on the Jyllands-Posten Muham­mad car­toons con­tro­versy which had occurred ear­lier in the year. At least one ven­dor, Canada’s Indigo chain of book­sellers, refused to sell the par­tic­u­lar issue. The arti­cle raised the ire of Indigo because it seemed to pro­mote the con­tin­u­ance of racially-motivated cartooning.

Spiegel­man writes: ‘Car­toon lan­guage is mostly lim­ited to deploy­ing a hand­ful of rec­og­niz­able visual sym­bols and clichés. It makes use of the dis­cred­ited pseu­do­sci­en­tific prin­ci­ples of phys­iog­nomy to por­tray char­ac­ter through a few phys­i­cal attrib­utes and facial expres­sions. It takes skill to use such clichés in ways that expand or sub­vert this impov­er­ished vocab­u­lary. Car­toon­ists like Hon­oré Dau­mier, Art Young, and George Grosz were mas­ters of insult and were rewarded for their trans­gres­sions: Dau­mier was impris­oned for ridi­cul­ing Louis-Phillippe; Art Young, the Social­ist edi­tor of The Masses, was tried for trea­son as a result of his anti-World War I car­toons; and George Grosz was tried var­i­ously for slan­der, blas­phemy, and obscen­ity before flee­ing Ger­many as the Nazis rose to power.

‘Spiegel­man goes on to crit­i­cize the Muham­mad car­toons: most of them are not well drawn, they lack a dis­cern­able mes­sage, and — in his view — they fail to “speak truth to power.”

Car­toons are impor­tant: why aren’t they bet­ter? Quite aside from the issue of stir­ring up reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists by depict­ing Muham­mad, there’s the prob­lem of decline in car­toon­ing, an argu­ment you pick up almost instantly upon look­ing at the old car­toons Spiegel­man has chosen.

Hard-hitting car­toons have mostly been replaced by top­i­cal laffs in gag-cartoon for­mat or by dec­o­ra­tive “Op-Ed” style illus­tra­tions whose mean­ings are often drowned in ambigu­ous sur­re­al­ism. “Ran­corous visual satire” is in short sup­ply these days. Spiegel­man wants more of it. I agree.

To down­load  Spiegelman’s arti­cle ‘Draw­ing blood: Out­ra­geous car­toons and the art of out­rage’ click on the car­toon above.