When the name Art Spiegelman is mentioned, naturally, the first thing that must come to mind is his hilariously vulgar and wildly famous Garbage Pail Kids or his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus.
However, a lot less known and much earlier than his popular punk trading cards, is a series of stickers, known as Wacky Packages. This series was created by Spiegelman, along with pulp master Norman Saunders, as a parody of favorite household brands and with its fresh and flippant humor managed to become “viral” in the late 1960‘s.
The concept proved popular enough that various attempts were made to relaunch the series later on by artists such as Kim Deitch, Drew Friedman and Bill Griffith; nevertheless, there really was no topping the original.
Even though the companies’ reactions varied, from Wonder Bread actually using the stickers as promotion and others trying to sue, the stickers succeeded in building quite a fan base of collectors, with the original art for the “Band-Ache’ sticker sold by the Topps company, in 2013, for $1,ooo,ooo.
via dangerousminds
Samuel Masters for Art-Sheep
