Garbage Trove

Being in Mark Newgarden’s house in Brooklyn is like hanging out in the brain of a middle-aged acid casualty. Every visible inch of space is crammed with so much grinning, bug-eyed ephemera from the last century of comics, you’d think you’d died and gone to ADD heaven. Or would it be ADD hell? Not entirely sure, but in any case, even if you were somehow able to make it past the over-stimulation and bunker down to get some work done, all that’d be waiting for you in the filing cabinets would be painting after painting of hacked-up kids and barfing monsters from Mark’s days designing gross-out cards for Topps. Mark recently invited us over to show us the cream of his crap.

Vice: Jesus, where did you get all this junk?

Mark Newgarden:

It’s the culmination of a lifetime of mental illness. It all starts with just walking down the street and keeping your eyes open. Most of the furniture in this room came out of dumpsters in the neighborhood when I moved in. A local school was throwing out all these shelves and the desks. I basically furnished this place off the street.

Was that Day-Glo antler-mount a dumpster find?

Nope, it came with the house. Before I bought it, this place was a funeral parlor, then a local men’s club.

A men’s club? You mean like one of those wood-paneled places where old Italian guys hang out?

It was one of those places in the 70s, then it was like an unlicensed hipster club in the 80s. Then there was that fire at that club the Happy Land Disco, and there was this big scandal about speakeasy-type clubs so they closed it down.

What’s with the fez guy? It looks like one of those old Matt Groening characters, Akbar and Jeff.

I was in a photography class at SVA and we went on a Coney Island field trip. There was this old funhouse that was slated to be knocked down, so we broke into it and got stuff out. We went back the next week and the whole thing was flattened. All this stuff’s from the 1920s. I got a couple of lady heads that are in a box in my basement, but that guy was the main find.

Do you break into a lot of places?

Actually it was the photography teacher who encouraged us to break in. He wanted to go in and get stuff. It was really amazing, just the fact that it was bulldozed down the next week. We really made it in the nick of time.

Crazy. Is this a working nickelodeon?

Yeah, if you’ve got a nickel. But you have to be over 18.

Oh, cause she’s getting naked…

verrrrrry slowly…

almost—crap. They really string you along to the last minute there.

Then cut you off at the neck.

Here’s some action.

That’s a painting for some pulp magazine that’s supposed to predict bathing suits of the future. I saw it in an auction and thought, “Man, that’s the greatest painting I’ve ever seen in my life.” There was one that went with it, “Bathing Suits of the Past,” but that wasn’t too interesting. If you really look at their expressions and all the stuff that’s going on with them, there’s a lot of weird tension. He’s offering the girls a smoke and then this guy’s sort of checking out the first guy’s flowered underpants, but they’re all really cold.

I don’t remember seeing that Garbage Pail Kid.

That’s a painting that was never used.

What was he going to be called? Some sort of pun on “appealing”?

The thing is, we always created them visually, then we named them all at the end in these big sessions. So we never really connected the names to the actual

Garbage Pail Kids

except as an afterthought.

“Graffiti Petey” was always my favorite.

I sketched that one out myself. He was early—first series, I think.

You came up with Barfo, too, right?

That was a group effort. This guy Abe Morgenstern, who was an old-time Topps candy guy there, came in with a Thanksgiving turkey baster and was like, “How do we turn this into a candy container?” So the obvious idea was to put a head on it. This is a prototype that somebody in China sent him when he asked what to do with it. I don’t know where they got the image for the face from, but it’s really weird.

It looks like some sort of old Charles Burns character.

Yeah. Anyway, there was this guy working with us named Stan Hart who decided to call it

Barfo

. It was my idea to make it like a nuclear 50s family; Spiegelman did an early sketch of it; and Drew Friedman wound up doing the real design. So it was a collaboration of quite a few people; but almost all this stuff was totally collaborative. Topps was a fun place to work back then.

I can imagine. You were also on the team for that sticker-yearbook thing Toxic High, weren’t you? How’d you guys come up with that?

Somehow Stan Hart came up with the name, and we got told, “We want a series called

Toxic High

.” So it became our job to figure out what the hell that was. In the end we based it on

Horrors of War

, this old pre-WWII trading card series that showed really nasty atrocities for kids. Like kids having their arms and legs blown off, nuns being raped, that kind of stuff—and these things came out in 1939. So we figured we’d do an updated version of that for high school.

Sort of prophetic on that front.

At a certain point the management started really freaking out, because kids really were blowing each other’s heads off in high schools, and our designs were exceptionally violent. We had to totally tame it down, take out all the blood, most of the violence. What ultimately came out was nowhere as intense as what we originally came up with. Twice we had to go through these big revisions with that thing, because they’d put a lot of money into, so they kind of had to release it, but at the same time they were scared to death.

Where’d the Bazooka Joe painting come from?

Topps had a big auction in the late 80s and I ended up meeting this guy that had bought a lot of stuff at the auction. He’d got the painting from the son of this guy Woody Gelman, who sort of created the whole Topps trading card thing, and I wound up trading him some stuff for it.

Art Spiegelman said those auctions were one of the main reasons he left Topps, that it was humiliating trying to buy back his own work with the wages they were paying him. Is that why you quit, too?

Eh, I left Topps because it got to be a frustrating situation. They were hiring me to create all these series that they would never release. There were about six or seven different ones that I brought to total finish, with finished paintings, and they would never release them. I just got fed up with the place and wound up leaving. I don’t quite understand the corporate mentality where they’d be pumping tons of money into this stuff and then shelving it.

What were some of the ones they sat on?

We did this one amazing series with Drew Friedman called

Ugly Americans

, which was just ugly people standing in front of the flag. They were incredible. The whole series was painted but Topps never released it.

What a bunch of chumps—I would have totally loved these guys as a kid.

This was going to be really cool, too. They asked us to do skateboard stickers, just as sort of a jumping off premise. This was with John Pound.

Is the car supposed to be fucking that guy?

Actually he’s riding him.

Oh, I get it. Again, this stuff is classic. I can’t believe they just stuffed it away.

We did a whole series of wanted posters that were sort of based on the old Jack Davis things; never released those. We did several series of updated

Wacky Packages

; they never released that. It just got to the point where I was like “What am I working for?” That was it for Topps.

Makes sense to me. Do you have any more cool tchotchkes?

Sure. These things are called

Psycho Ceramics

. They came out in the late 50s and they’re sort of like these suicide-themed three-dimensional greeting cards. They’re all about self-mutilation and joy at the same time, which is always a great combination.

Is that Hitler as one of those carnival knockdown dolls?

Yep. I found him at a flea market in Pennsylvania decades ago with a bunch of regular ones. The slang term for them is ‘punks.’ I guess it’s got a lot of connotations to a lot of different subcultures.

NICK GAZIN

Fantagraphics just put out a compilation of Mark Newgarden’s syndicated work from the past two decades called

We All Die Alone

. Check it out at fantagraphics.com