Just as America's children grudgingly trudge back to school in August, Topps will lighten their academic travails by supplying them with a new edition of the slyly subversive Garbage Pail Kids stickers.  Back in the mid-80s there was considerable snickering in the schoolroom as kids passed around any of the 15 series of Garbage Pail Kids cards, which appeared between 1985 and 1988 and featured gross-out illustrations of characters like 'Brainy Janey' and 'Corroded Carl.'  Art Spiegelman helped dream up the 80s cards' clever concepts and names, those alliterative or internal rhyming appellations that were the perfect complement to the comically revolting visuals supplied by Jay Lynch, John Pound, and Tom Bunk.

The new GPK stickers come in foil packs, not wax packs, but unlike most modern card product, they do have gum -- four pieces of 'gross-out' green gum (it only looks like snot, it really tastes good, trust me).  Each piece of gum has a full color wrapper with a one of 30 classic Garbage Pail Kids images on it.  Since each GPK image was always given two different names that means that there will be 60 different wrappers to collect.  The 99-cent foil packs will also include 4 sticker cards, one of which will be printed on foil.  The new GPK series includes 29 pieces of art that Topps originally commissioned for a never-released sixteenth series of GPK sticker cards, plus 11 new pieces of art from the same masters of gross-out humor who produced the classic GPK series.  Since in classic GPK fashion, each piece of art will receive two names, there will be 80 stickers to collect in the new series.