Two Artists Make the Garbage Pail Kids Grow Up

Gallery Follows the Text

Like every other child who grew up in the 1980’s Garbage Pail Kids hold a special place in my heart. In fact, as I write this there is a “Stuck Chuck” GPK card staring at me. While I like to reminisce fondly about the various cards made containing my name—Charred Charlie, Charming Charlie, Up Chuck, Cheeky Charles and Ground Chuck are the ones I remember off the tip of my head—that’s about as far as I take my affinity for the cards 30 years past their heyday. Two St. Louis based artists took their love of the Topps trading card set much, much further.

After having a lengthy conversation about the vulgar cards during lunch artists Jake Houvenagle and Brandon Voges created one of the coolest art projects we have ever seen. They wondered what it would be like for the kids in the cards to grow up into adulthood and then they made it happen. Instead of just sketching out adult versions of “Adam Bomb” and “Barfin’ Barbara” they used real life sets and people to take photographs of their visions. And they didn’t stop there, they created a backstory for what the characters had been doing to keep themselves busy for the last 30-odd years.

“I was a huge fan of Garbage Pail Kids and had a large collection as a kid,” Voges explains on his blog. “The idea of revisiting them, thinking through their story and shooting these portraits was a dream. We had to make this happen.”

So far they have re-imagined six of the iconic cards, which you can see in the gallery below. Their entire backstories and videos of how they were created are available at Bruton Stroube.