Topps Wacky Packages
Lost Wackys Series 1

THE HISTORY

• Many titles were proposed which never made it to be actual wackys. Most of these did not get past the stage of being roughs, however some titles were painted as finished products but were nixed, for whatever reason, before actual final release. These finished wackys have become known as "Lost Wackys".
• Very many unpublished pieces of Wacky Package original art have surfaced.
  • Several of these pieces came from the Guernsey auction
  • Others have appeared on proof sheets or from private collections.
  • Many others were leaked by the original artists themselves who usually kept pictures of their pieces.
  • The production of the ANS series starting in 2004 also resulted in a great number of additional lost wackys.
• Every lost wacky has a colorful story behind it. Here are a couple:
  • The original Garbage Pail Kid was itself a Wacky Package that was painted by John Pound but never used. At the time Cabbage Patch Kids were not all that popular, but a while later they became huge and Topps decided to make an entire parody series about them based on the GPK original. This eventually led to a nasty law suit between Topps and CPK. At some point the CEO of Topps was so aggravated by the whole thing that he demanded the very first original GPK be brough to him so he could burn it - and that's exactly what he did. All that remained was a modest photograph. This was included in the LW1 series and was eventually remastered to high resolution and printed again in LW3. In any case, the only place the very first ever GPK was printed was in these lost wacky series, which alone makes them highly sought after.
  • In 2004 Topps set up a table at the San Diego Comic Convention. Collector Greg Grant was there and noticed they had displayed in their glass display case a partially finished title Janitor in a Slum that nobody had ever seen before - a very cool Saunders title. He took a picture of it and posted it on the Wacky Pack forum. From that picture somebody remastered it and finished the background and voila a lost wacky title was born and found its way into Lost Wackys Series 1. Eventually, in 2008, Topps started including their own Lost Wackys sporadically in the new series and Janitor in a Slum was published as such in Flashback Series 1.
• By the early 2000's collectors had amassed enough titles to make a whole lost series. Actually printing a series was a long standing dream of small group of Wacky Pack historians. But the logistics of actually doing it was daunting and involved the coordination of many people, not all of whom always got along. But after much wrangling and disagreements, a series finally started to come together in 2003. Timing was bad however, because that is exactly when Topps announced they would release new wackys. Until that point Topps couldn't care less about Wackys or what the collectors did. Now suddenly they cared very much. That added an additional hurdle to overcome. After much discussion with Topps, collectors got the nod to print a very limited very underground run of the Lost Wackys series - intended for the die-hard collectors to trade amongst themselves. So in 2004 at long last Lost Wackys finally saw the light of day. A total of 120 sets were printed.
  • But unbeknownst to the syndicate, two members snuck in variations on about a dozen titles. This was discovered only after half the sets had already been distributed. This caused the first Lost Wacky World War. Eventually replacement titles were printed for all modified titles and offered in a third green pack, with some bonus titles. Originally people had to trade in the altered titles to get the green pack. But unscrupulous members eventually put many of those variations back on the market. They are now a fact of life.
    • One of the modified titles that was distributed with the original packs was Garbage Pail Kids giving the middle finger. A second variation was printed with the baby giving the thumb's up. The thumbs up version was printed as a test of a particular sticker stock which was ultimately not used for the series. Those thumbs up test stickers were not supposed to be distributed, they were in fact supposed to be destroyed. But some years later a few of these also surfaced, now called the GPK-Fonz variation. The three GPK variations have become highly sought after and quite hard to come by, particularly the thumbs up version.

The TITLES

• There are 30 titles in the series, they were packaged in two packs with 15 stickers in each, one purple, one yellow.
• There were two bonus stickers included which were not on the checklist. Red Veins and Ovary Show.

The CHECKLISTS/PUZZLES

• The main checklist puzzle was based on Janitor in a Slum. Three alternate puzzles were produced, Mixwell Hearse, Jujubats and GPK (remastered).
• The alternates were printed in 2005 but some did not surfaceFBI_losts_front.jpg for more than ten years due to ongoing disagreements amongst the members. In fact some of this stuff was supposed to be destroyed and some members did, but inevitably some amount of all variations have now been released to the community.