Vintage 1980s Gross-Out Monster Pin Set 🤢 13 Named Pinback Buttons, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired

🤢 What Were Those Monster Buttons Kids Got for a Quarter in the 1980s? 13 Vintage Gross-Out Pins, Every Face Named

Size: All 13 pins 1 1/2" ~ Unused old stock.

Thirteen painted faces, thirteen names printed right on the button, and not a pretty one in the bunch. Biface, Bot Eye, Cat Bat, Crater Face, Creep Queen, Evileen, Hog Head, Mad Marvin, Mummeye, Ocufungus, Pigulus, Pufang and Sad Lad. You laugh first and cringe second, which is exactly how these were supposed to work. Parents and teachers hated these things so much!

The way collectors remember it, these were vending machine buttons. You'd drop a quarter in the machine by the grocery store doors on the way out, and out came a monster with his name printed right on his face. There were about a dozen of them to chase, and some collectors call them Goulie Faces. Each one is printed paper under a glossy clear cover, with a gray back and a brass-colored safety pin, and each pin here is drawn from my stack of that design.

🤮 Gross Was In

Topps started it in 1985 with Garbage Pail Kids, a gross-out parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls dreamed up by Art Spiegelman and drawn at first by John Pound. The doll company sued in 1986 and schools all over the country banned the cards, which of course made every kid want them more. Madballs followed from AmToy, the toy arm of American Greetings: foam balls with disgusting faces, first in stores in 1986, with the slogan "Freaky fun for everyone!" Then came the copycats, Whacky Ghoulies, Ugly Balls, ERTL's Blurp Balls, Mel Appel's Weird Balls and Lanard's Spit Balls.

These 13 were never official Madballs. Their names play off the licensed toys without copying them, the way Ocufungus plays off Oculus Orbus, and nobody put a maker's name on them. The one clue is on Hog Head, where the word CHINA runs along the top of the rim. They were the playground cousins of the big licensed toys, telling the same jokes with characters of their own. They are definitely neat.

👻 Thirteen Faces, Thirteen Legends

Here's what makes this set more fun than it has any right to be. Every one of these goofy faces drags a real old story along behind it.

Biface is half purple monster and half regular kid, gritting his teeth like he's trying very hard to keep the other half in. That's Jekyll and Hyde on a button. Robert Louis Stevenson's wife Fanny woke him from a nightmare in Bournemouth and he complained, "Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale."

Bot Eye has big blue-violet eyes bulging out of his head, so he gets the evil eye, one of the oldest beliefs in the world, with amulets against it from around 5,000 years ago.

Cat Bat has Dracula's hairline, a cat's eyes and a mouthful of fangs. Bela Lugosi's own widow's peak, sharpened with makeup for the 1931 film, became the picture of a vampire for everybody after him.

Crater Face is pitted like the surface of a very unfortunate moon. Old European tradition says the Man in the Moon was banished up there for some crime, and one version makes him the man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath. My own theory is that this fellow is what he looks like after a few billion years of getting hit by rocks.

Creep Queen looks like a china doll that got dropped, with red cracks down the forehead and a mouth full of fangs. She always puts me in mind of Robert the Doll of Key West, who folks say moves on his own. Visitors are told to ask his permission before taking his picture, and I would ask hers too.

Evileen almost looks sweet until you get to the two fangs. She reminds me of the cat sìth, the fairy cat of the Scottish Highlands, believed to steal the soul of someone who had just died by passing over the body, which is why families kept a watch called the Late Wake with music, games and catnip.

Hog Head is the friendliest monster of the lot, buck teeth and all. Every December The Queen's College, Oxford carries a boar's head through its hall, and the story they tell is of a student who choked a charging boar by ramming his Aristotle down its throat with a cry of "Graecum est."

Mad Marvin is my pick for the grossest one in the series, a face built of pink worms or guts with one eyeball popped out. A fellow pieced together from spare parts means Frankenstein, and the cold, rainy Year Without a Summer of 1816 when Mary Shelley, 18 years old, had her "waking dream" on Lake Geneva.

Mummeye is a mummy's head with one bloodshot eye pushed out through the bandages. A mummy plus an eye, and somebody decided that was the name. For Boris Karloff's 1932 mummy, Jack Pierce started the makeup at 11 in the morning and finished at 7 that night.

Ocufungus is one big eye dead center with green fungus creeping across his brow. That's the Cyclops, and in 1914 the paleontologist Othenio Abel offered a story for where the one-eyed giant came from: dwarf elephant skulls on the Mediterranean islands, with one huge opening in the middle where the trunk once attached.

Pigulus has a doughy face like somebody's great-uncle and a pig's snout where his nose should be, and he carries one of the strangest legends England ever fell for: Tannakin Skinker, the "Hog-faced Gentlewoman" of 1639, who ate from a silver trough while a Scottish captain ran off saying he "could indure no Porke."

Pufang is a slimy baby face with one eye squeezed shut, a joke on the Cabbage Patch craze that had parents fighting in the aisles in 1983. Xavier Roberts told his customers his dolls weren't for sale. They could only be adopted.

Sad Lad looks like he just found out summer vacation is over. He always makes me think of the Crying Boy, the mass-produced print that set off a curse scare in the British tabloid The Sun in September 1985, the same year Topps put out the Garbage Pail Kids. I promise he has never set anything on fire.

📌 Wear Them or Frame Them

Pin them on a denim jacket, a backpack or a Halloween costume, or line up all 13 in a shadow box into a whole wall of cheerful ugliness. Like everything I keep, these live in the dark at under 40% relative humidity and a steady 72°F. These little throwaway buttons were made to be worn to pieces and lost. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.