About Garbage Pail Kids

Garbage Pail Kids, aka GPK, are non-sport cards/stickers made by Topps Inc. between 1985 and 1988 in the U.S.A. Since girls had Cabbage Patch Kid Dolls back then, they created GPK for the boys, to make fun of the Cabbage Patch Kid Dolls.

Due to a slow public response the U.S. 1st series had a low print run. By 3rd series they were extremely popular and Topps started to mass produce them. Around the 10th series the popularity of GPK had died down and the later series were produced in smaller quanities.

Several artists have contributed to the creation of GPK. Art Spiegelman and Mark Newgarden were the editors and art directors. John Pound created over half of the GPK drawing. Jay Lynch, Tom Bunk, James Warhola and Howard Cruse also helped with some of the drawing for the fronts and backs. John Pound still has original drawing for sale at his website. The Topps company has also been selling orginal color drawing on eBay.

There is a total of 15 series released in the U.S. and a 16th series that was never released. The cards/stickers were numbered 1-620 with two names for each card/sticker. There is an "a" and a "b" card for each number making the complete US set without variations, 1240 cards. There are also two giant series that were released (Giant Stickers and 1st Series Kids). There are 15 cards in each of the giant series sets.

There are also other items made on Garbage Pail Kids other than the cards/stickers. Placo and Imperial Toys are two companies who made many licensed items such as folders, puffy stickers, bouncy balls, sunglasses, pop-up toys, mugs, jewelry sets, tacky snappers, pencil case, school sets, pencil billboards and sticker albums. There are also many unlicensed products such as watches, plates, lighters and folders to name a few.

With the success of the U.S. Garbage Pail Kids, there are many foreign countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chili, Japan, Israel, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Holland, Jordan, Spain, France, Canada and Germany that produced them also. The foreign GPK use the same drawings as the U.S. but are written in there own language. The Argentina, Chili and Italy series 3 have some original artwork that were not seen in the U.S. GPK.

In 1987 Topps was sued by Mattel, which is the company that created Cabbage Patch Kids because of copyright infringements. GPK looked to much like Cabbage Patch Kids so they were forced to change the way they were drawn by changing the number of fingers, making the forehead higher, making the ears stick out more, etc. Topps stopped producing GPK in 1988 due to the lawsuit and lack of sales.