What is a Garbage Pail Kid?

This seems like a good place to start.

Garbage Pail Kids were a series of trading cards/stickers brought out by Topps, first in 1985. If you are a child of the 80s, as I am, you might remember them.

I won’t bore you with the details, Wikipedia can help you out if you are interested, suffice to say, they were originally a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids – at least the first few series were – but after Topps lost a court battle to the Cabbage Patch Kids holding company, it changed the way GPKs looked in the late 80s. That’s why, in my view, the best cards are the first few series. After that, I don’t care much for the look and feel of them. But each to their own.

There have been a thousands series brought out since 1985. Even today, Topps continues to produce Garbage Pail Kids cards. But it was never going to better the original series (OS). There is a community of GPK collectors out there. On FB you will find various pages and groups dedicated to them, and to trading in them. eBay too, has a great many for sale.

And there are so many versions – even the originals varied by country – but the cornerstone set is the US version, and that is what I’ll be dealing exclusively in.The cards were notorious in the 80s. Sometimes banned, often frowned upon and always controversial, their notoriety only really served to make them more desirable.

Each series worked like this: it would contain around 80 cards to collect, split into 40 or so characters. Each character would have two different names, an “a” card and a “b” card. Collect them all, and you’d have a complete set. There were 15 series in all but, as I say, only interested in the first nine here.

It gets far more complicated than that, once you get into variations, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

On the back of each card was a cartoon of some sort.Here is a picture of a rather worn “Adam Bomb” card from the first series, front and back. He is iconic, largely because he was used as the mascot for all series – appearing on boxes, sticker packs and posters alike. He has a thousand friends, I’ll introduce you to them all down the line, but so far as the look and feel of GPKs goes, he just about says everything needed to give you a sense of what these wonderful little gems were all about.