Vintage 1980s Pigulus Gross-Out Monster Pin 📌 Pig-Nosed Baby Face Pinback Button, Weird Retro Collectible

Remember Pigulus? 🐷 Pigulus: Half Baby Face, Half Hog

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Pigulus Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! Look at this guy. He has a soft, doughy face like somebody's great-uncle, bushy purple eyebrows, watery green eyes rimmed in red, and right where his nose should be, a pig's snout with two dark nostrils. His lips are dark and pouty and a fat pink tongue is hanging out of the side of his mouth. PIGULUS is printed in black along the lower left edge. The name sounds like it came out of the same meeting as the real Madballs Slobulus and Oculus Orbus, and I think that is exactly the joke.

The front is printed paper under a glossy clear cover, and the back is gray with a brass-colored safety pin. The close-up of a button back and the last photo, three backs lying next to a quarter, are there to show the construction and the size.

🤢 Madballs, Garbage Pail Kids and the Knockoffs

Madballs were a huge hit in the 1980s, and they came right on the heels of the Garbage Pail Kids. They spawned a bunch of others including Whacky Ghoulies, Ugly Balls, Burp Balls, Weird Balls, and Spit Balls. Parents and teachers hated these things so much!

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, a toy company owned by the American Greetings Corporation: foam balls with disgusting faces, first in stores in 1986. The copycats came fast. ERTL made a line of Blurp Balls drawn by the artist James Groman, The Mel Appel Company made Weird Balls, and Lanard Toys made Spit Balls. The official Madballs had their own pig, Swine Sucker, an ugly drooling wild boar, and the Weird Balls line had one called Wart Hog, so Pigulus was in good company.

Pigulus was never one of the official Madballs, though. It belongs to a whole cast of named monster buttons that collectors trade together, with names like Mummeye, Craterface, Creep Queen, Mad Marvin, Pufang, Cat Bat, Hog Head, Ocufungus and Sad Lad. Nobody put a maker's name on them, and I have never found who made the series. They are definitely neat.

🐽 The Pig-Faced Lady

Pigulus reminds me of one of the strangest legends England ever fell for. Stories of a pig-faced woman turned up at almost the same time in the Netherlands, England and France in the late 1630s, and they nearly always go the same way. A rich woman who is expecting a baby turns away a beggar and her children and compares them to pigs. The beggar curses her, and her daughter is born perfect in every way except for the face of a pig. The girl eats out of a silver trough, grunts when she talks, and her worried parents offer a fortune to any man who will marry her.

In one week of December 1639 five different ballads about Tannakin Skinker, the "Hog-faced Gentlewoman," were published in London. They are all lost now, but a chapbook from 1640 survives. It says her father offered a dowry of 40,000 pounds. A Scottish captain spent most of a month's pay on a new suit to court her, lifted her veil, and ran off saying he "could indure no Porke." A pig farmer was sure that knowing pigs meant he could handle her, and he left saying he had never seen "such a Hogsnout." After that the family gave up and moved to London. Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, even kept a 1640 ballad about a pig-headed woman from Holland in his collection.

Then the legend got attached to a real woman. Griselda Steevens paid for Dr Steevens' Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, and lived in it from 1723 until she died. She had trouble with her eyes and wore a veil in the sun, and by the 1800s it was common belief in Dublin that she was hiding a pig's face under it. The story goes that she sat out on an open balcony so people could see her, and hung her own portrait in the hospital hall, and folks still believed the rumor. The man who wrote the hospital's history found no sign of the story in her lifetime at all.

London had its own go at it in the winter of 1814. Word spread that a pig-faced lady was living in Marylebone, and a would-be husband put an ad in the papers. The Times refused to print it and gave his one-pound fee to the Marine Society, and a letter writer to The Times said that if he meant to have her, "he must woo her in grunts." Showmen took living pig-faced ladies around the fairs, and those may well have been shaved bears in dresses. The last serious book to treat pig-faced women as real came out in 1924, and today the legend is almost forgotten. Pigulus is doing his part to keep it alive.

📌 Wear It or Frame It

Pin it on a denim jacket, a backpack or a Halloween costume, or put it in a shadow box with your other gross-out buttons. It's a perfect little gift for the pig lover with a weird sense of humor, or anybody who grew up with Madballs.