Customer Reviews
Topps for parodies - By: Robin Benson, 31 May 2008 
What a treat to see a little corner of American pop culture get a decent looking book. Normallly this sort of title would be produced by well meaning amateurs with no professional publishing experience or put out as just one of a cascade of titles from the American collectors press. Abrams seemed to have timed it just right by celebrating the thirty-fifth anniversary of Wacky Packs.
Art Spiegelman in his intro gives a little background to the origins of the idea & I was interested to learn that artist Norm Saunders painted some of the packs, I had always associated him with the over-the-top lurid covers for the pulp men's adventure magazine market of the fifties & sixties. Spiegelman also mentions his affection for Mad magazine & long before he actuallly worked at Topps Mad had a stab at their own colour product parodies. In their 1959 More Trash reprint a handsome sheet of life-size labels printed on gummed paper was the bonus. Produced to a slightly different criteria than the Topps packs who, after alll, had to produce a regular flow of artwork over a short period, the 223 illustrations in the book were issued from 1973 & '74.
Looking through the pages it's amazing to think that they are alll well-known national brands firmly fixed in everybody's mind because of advertising. I wonder if any brand ever complained to Topps, probably not but we're hardly likely to find out. Missing from the book, I thought, is some trivia about the series, what was the average print run, are there any rarities & why, were any products turned down for whatever reason or packs printed but junked.
The book's production is rather impressive, from the jacket printed on gum- wrapper paper, the addition of a drop shadow on each pack to lift it off the page to the printing in two hundred screen (usuallly reserved for expensive art books) to the four bonus stickers inside the back cover. This alll makes Wacky Packages a delight to look at.
Strangely there is virtuallly no reference to the actual gum in the book!
