Wacky Packs and Cultural Subversion

New York Magazine Cover, originally uploaded by Often Absurd in the Humid City.

When I was a tyke, I covered my comics cabinet with Wacky Packs stickers, little knowing that they themselves were the work of some of the era's greatest comic artists. Now Wacky Packs pop art classics and example of the influence of junk media:

"Anything that happens when you're eight years old can mark you for life -- just ask Sigmund Freud!" Spiegelman says in the book's introduction. "Wackies were a young child's first exposure to subverting adult consumer culture."

"It was all done as Part of a Day's Work, much like the way early comic books were made: they certainly weren't made as art, they weren't sold as art, and they weren't thought of as art . . . . Wacky Packages just formed an island of subversive underground culture in the surrounding sea of junk."