The typical Wacky Packages card featured a peel-off sticker that mocked the appearance and name of some well-known brand of household product, grocery item, or staple of the drugstore. A bottle of fetid-looking salad dressing labeled Fish-Bone, a foam-mouthed dog on the label of a can of Rabid Shave shaving cream, a Bustedfinger candy bar with a big swollen finger poking through the wrapper, a bar of Vile soap. A checklist card came in every package, along with a square of chewable pink cellulose, and every few months Topps would bring out a new series. Topps card designer Art Spiegelman and his colleagues (among them the great pulp-magazine cover artist Norman Saunders and underground-comix stalwarts Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, and Bhob Stewart) wound the spiral of mockery so tight that the fourth series featured a card depicting Wormy Packages, worm-infested trading stickers intended (like Wacky Packages themselves, like all the products and advertisements they mocked, like everything, by implication, that you saw, heard, or paid attention to, every moment of your young media-saturated life) to pry loose a nickel from your pocket.
To any kid who had picked up a copy of Mad magazine during the previous twenty years, there was nothing new or generationally distinctive about the flavor of mockery to which Wacky Packages subjected the features of the American brandscape. The salient novelty of Wacky Packages was not their irreverence toward copywriter clichés or subversion of the ineluctability of brands and logos but their free, and at the time, startling use of “gross” humor. The first few series of cards employed imagery such as lice, poisonous dog food, exposed brains, Putrid cat chow, maggots, toe corns, flesh peeled away by Band-Ache strips, a powdered-blood breakfast drink for vampires (Fang), and saliva. What made that kind of imagery so startling was not the humor itself. Gross or sick humor was a fundamental mode of children’s discourse. Dead-baby jokes; songs about vomit, snot, diarrhea, and other forms of excrement; anecdotes and urban legends of cannibalism, coprophagia, brain-eating earwigs – at the age of eight or nine, along with all of my peers, I had assumed custody of a vast repertoire of wondrously disgusting material. The shock value of Wacky Packages had nothing to do with, in this sense, their content. They depicted or referred to nothing that I had not imagined, rhymed about, discussed, drawn, or seen for myself. What was so shocking about Wacky Packages was that they were a production of the adult world. Adults had conceived and painted them; adults had manned the rotating drums of the printing presses and the machine that wrapped each pack of two cards in waxed paper; adults had trucked the Wacky Packages to the drugstore, where you handed over your five cents to an adult who, perhaps most shockingly of all, allowed you to buy them. It was as if your mother encouraged you to play with your food, or your father handed you his expensive German shortwave radio and a screwdriver and told you to go right ahead and figure out how the damn thing worked.
In retrospect, I see the early-1973 Wacky Packages craze as a pivotal moment in the history of American childhood. Prior to this, gross humor was a kind of code, a thieves’ argot spoken only when out of earshot of adults, who – one knew it on faith if not through painful experience – never would have permitted or approved of it. Would not have understood it, in fact. Songs about boogers and vomit were transmissions in a frequency that would sound to the adult ear like infuriating squawk, annoying static. And that was their point. Along with the unwritten rules and nuances of byzantine games played in vacant lots and alleyways, gross humor was a principal means by which children signaled and celebrated the absence of adults in the immediate vicinity. We were a generation – maybe the last full generation – that adults left alone, at least sometimes. Singing a disgusting song or telling a cruel riddle (Q: What do you call a man with no arms or legs when you throw him in the ocean? A: Bob) was like running up an insurgent flag in a neighborhood where the occupier had been driven back for the moment. At the same time, the gore and mayhem, the amputations, the fatalities, the abominations described by gross humor also constituted a way of acknowledging the implicit danger of living in a world devoid of adults and of the protection they theoretically afforded.
The adults who sold us Wacky Packages spoke the secret language; they entered boldly into the preserve or magic ghetto of childhood under the insurgent flag. I remember how it felt to open those first packs of Wacky Packages stickers: delicious, incredible, pleasurable in the way that only something truly wrong can be. Because in the long run, Wacky Packages, and the cultural trend of which they turned out to be the leading edge, were bad for children. I don’t mean bad in any kind of easy, moralistic way. Children must learn to mock capitalism and the uses to which it seeks to put them as early as they learn how to swim. And I wouldn’t care – I’d secretly applaud it – if my son and his friends wasted every free moment they had creating taxonomies of vomit by chunkiness and color. It’s just that they now have so few moments that can be said to be free in any sense of the word. So much of their culture – that compound of lore and play – is now the trademarked product and property of adults. The men who sold us Wacky Packages were like those traders in Hudson’s Bay blankets – good, warm blankets – whose stock gradually drove out the native product and sent the traditional weaving craft into decline. We sold out our liberty and gave up control over our ancient heritage of vulgarity for the thrill of seeing it done up in four-color lithography, transferable to a notebook or a classroom desk, scented with the sweet dust of bubble gum.
After Wacky Packages came Slime, the first “disgusting” toy (1977), and Garbage Pail Kids stickers (1985) and the advent of fart jokes in Walt Disney cartoons (The Lion King, 1994) and that masterpiece of the confectioner’s art, Sour Flush, acrid sweet powder that comes packaged in a miniature plastic toilet to be dabbed at and consumed by means of the moistened end of an edible plunger. And then one day children looked around and saw that there was no corner, no alleyway, no space anywhere in their lives that was free of adult supervision, adult mediation, adult control. All sports are organized sports, trick-or-treating takes place in school gymnasiums, and parents who send their children out to play where I used to play, in the street – in the street! – court well-publicized tragedies such as abduction and intervention by the minions of Child Protective Services. Captain Underpants, champion of flatulence and bodily fluids, is a mainstay of the Scholastic Book Club. The reading of the books is not only condoned but encouraged by teachers and librarians, grateful that boys are interested in reading anything at all.
In detesting, disapproving of the Captain Underpants books, I am not trying to disparage my son’s taste in fiction, to belittle his choices, to withhold my approval of him. God knows I have nothing against boogers. This is where the hypocrisy comes in. I loved Wacky Packages. I knew every foul verse of the classic anthems “Suffocation” (Suffocation, mental retardation / Suffocation, the game we like to play) and “Diarrhea” (later made famous in the film Parenthood). If Captain Underpants had been around when I was a kid, I probably would have loved him, too. But knowing that doesn’t make it any harder for me to wish Captain Underpants away. The irony of the series is too painful. George and Harold, the young protagonists, enjoy the unscheduled time and freedom from adult supervision that I (and no doubt Dav Pilkey) once took for granted. The boys imagine, create, and draw their own superhero adventures (including those of Super Diaper Baby) within the context of an old-fashioned adult world that still disapproves heartily of boys’ taking pleasure from talking about pee and poop and snot. George and Harold’s teachers, one comes to realize, would never allow them to read Captain Underpants books, let alone help win free copies of them for their classroom by placing book-club orders with Scholastic. The original spirit of mockery has been completely inverted; it is now the adult world that mocks children, implicitly and profitably, speaking its old language, invoking its bygone secret pleasures.
I see my disapproval of Captain Underpants, therefore, as a drawing of a line between my son and me, between his world and mine, between adulthood and childhood, as a small, feeble attempt to reestablish the contours of a boundary that in the greater culture has grown vague, disregarded, abused. If I withdraw my approval of Captain Underpants – if I tell my son I will gladly supply him with good books and comics but that if he wants to read those damned Captain Underpants, he’ll have to pay for them himself – that withdrawal creates a gap, a small enchanted precinct of parental disapproval within which he can curl up, for a minute, for the time it takes to read a crass, vibrant, silly 120-page book with big print, one that he paid for himself, and thrill to the deep, furtive pleasure of annoying one’s father. There is no way to draw that line, to re-create that boundary,