A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2010 Abrams ComicArts and Topps Company When Topps Chewing Gum reintroduced Wacky Packages to the public in 1973 after a short mid-1960s  production run, I was 10 years old and still re-assimilating to American culture after living abroad for six years. I was picking up the language in leaps and bounds, and my reading comprehension skills were above the fourth grade level. I was a spirited, fun-loving kid then, and like many of my peers, I loved the irreverent "Wackys" that poked fun at name-brand products and, by extension, America's consumer culture. When I was a lad of 11, I thought that this parody of Cheer detergent (a brand my mother often bought) was the epitome of hilarity. (C) 1974 Topps Chewing Gum, Inc. Of course, at that age I didn't think in terms of Oh, Topps is satirizing America's consumer culture. Adult-style analyses such as that would only occur to me years later. 10-year-old me thought the parodies of products one would find at...

(C) 2016 Abrams ComicArts and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On August 16, 2016, Abrams ComicArts, an imprint of New York City-based Abrams Books, published Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: The Original Topps Trading Card Series, the third volume in writer-editor Gary Gerani's series of books about Topps' Star Wars- themed trading card series.  Like the previous two volumes ( Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series and   Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: The Original Topps Trading Card Series ), Gerani's book tells a Topps insider's story about the creation of the 220 trading cards and 55 stickers that the confectionary and trading card company produced between 1983 and 1984.  Gary Gerani, the Topps editor in charge of the company's Star Wars trading card line, chose Drew Struzan's iconic imagery used in the now-rare Revenge of the Jedi poster created before George Lucas changed the name of Episode VI to Return of the Jedi. (C) 1983 Topps Ch...

(C) 2015 Abrams ComicsArt and Lucasfilm Ltd (LFL)   The Story So Far.... A long time ago in a South Florida apartment far, far away, I started collecting Topps' Star Wars trading cards. It was the fall of 1977, and we were "in between" houses; Mom had sold our three bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom home (with its huge backyard) in September and bought a townhouse in the Fountainbleau Park complex of condos, based on a couple of visits to the model home and on the floor plans provided by Trafalgar, the General Electric-owned developer that was building the new Eastwind Lake Village subdivision of Fountainbleau. I wasn't keen on the idea, but I was 14 at the time and not in a position to question my mother's decisions. The developers had promised my mother the house would be ready by October, but bad weather and issues with the builders caused delays. Now we were stuck in that apartment till January, perhaps even February of 1978. I wasn't thrilled ...

This is the cover of the second printing from October 2008. It differs from the first printing thusly: instead of "interview with Art Spiegelman,"  the credit reads "introduction by Art Spiegelman." The bonus pack of rare and unreleased stickers is also different. I own a copy of the first printing from June, 2008. (C) 2008 Topps and Abrams ComicArts If you were a kid in the early 1970s, you probably remember Topps' Wacky Packages, a long-running series of stickers that parodied the packaging of  well-known consumer products, including packaged foods, personal hygiene items, and (in later series) nation-wide publications. In the hands of such artists as Art Spiegelman, Jay Lynch, and other comic book artists of the Sixties and Seventies, familiar brands were ripe targets for spoofing as Wacky Packages. Here, Quaker Oats' Cap'n Crunch is transformed into Cap'n Crud. (C) 1973 Topps Chewing Gum Company.  In the summer of 1973, I was a ...