![]() ![]() All manner of authority was being questioned and scorned, and that meant not just the government but the very building blocks of American culture and its attendant materialism. Remember, this was the Watergate Era, right after the 1960s. ![]() And the eponymous "Wacky Packages," which includes an interview with Art Spiegelman, master of the highbrow-lowbrow balancing act, pulls it off - right down to the waxy cover that captures the feel of buying the stickers in a corner drug store when you were 7 or 8. ![]() It seems like heresy to collect such images into a gift book printed on thick, shiny stock, but that's what we do with childhood memories these days. They were a gross, exuberant gallery of familiar American consumer products bastardized in the name of Mad Magazine-style humor and lovingly committed to full-color stickers. Effectively one-panel comic books for your back pocket, they came in wax-paper packs with a brittle slab of pink bubble gum just like sports cards once did.īut while the baseball and football cards were pure American pastoral, Wacky Packages seemed more of a burnout sibling. The product was called Wacky Packages.įor the uninitiated, Wacky Packages ("Wacky Packs" to their Gen-X fans) were sticker cards introduced by Topps Chewing Gum, most renowned for its status as the standard bearer of American baseball cards since the early 1950s. Today, when anything without a wink or a nudge is either suspect for its naivete or genius for its retro sensibility, it is difficult to imagine a world in which satirizing the country's most established advertising icons was subversive.īut there was such a time: the early 1970s, at the dawn of the age of irony. Spend a half hour with Photoshop and your throwaway burst of creativity can convincingly skewer American brand identities that have been decades in the making. When it comes to creating parody in the post-ironic world, the tools available to us are plentiful and democratic. ![]()
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