When I was a kid, almost any kid-eye-level surface seemed to be be-stickered with some kind of gross sticker that we all thought was hilarious, usually Garbage Pail Kids ones. It was like the world was a big physical 4Chan, and our GIFs were stickers. But the best ones were the rare car-related series, Weird Wheels.
I haven't seen these in years, but when I followed a Boing Boing link to this page, a flood of visual memories came flooding back. Karswell, the man behind the And Everything Else Too blog, has scanned and posted the entire collection of Topps 1980 Weird Wheels series.
The series plays heavily on the work of Big Daddy Roth and similar hot-rod artists of the 60s and 70s, even if it was a bit out of date by the 1980s. I especially love the breadth of the cars they chose to include — there's Studebakers and Alfas and Checkers and even a Citröen 2CV, which may very likely be the first time a whole generation of American kids ever saw a 2CV at all. Which is why they all think they're driven by hunchbacks.
Many of these were painted by a veteran trading card painter named Norm Saunders, who's maybe best known for his Mars Attacks series. Norm painted these when he was in his 70s and sick with emphysema, prompting his son to ask that he stop. Here's what Norm told him:
"It's fun! I gotta keep working. What the hell else am I gonna do?"
Which is how I react when people tell me to stop doing stupid things when I'm old and sick and probably smelly.
Anyway, head over to the site for the full set, and enjoy the adolescent thrill of monsters and drippy things driving wildly over-engined cars.
(Thanks Mark, for posting this on Boing Boing!)