Vintage 1980s Sad Lad Gross-Out Pin 📌 Droopy Bloodshot Monster Face, Pin-Back Button in the Spirit of the 80s Gross-Out Craze

Remember Sad Lad? 😢 Sad Lad: The Gloomiest Face in the Bunch

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Sad Lad Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! Poor Sad Lad. His pale gray face is scrunched into the saddest scowl you ever saw: a heavy furrowed brow, two huge dark eyes sitting in bloodshot, red-veined whites, and a long droopy nose hanging down over everything. SAD LAD is printed in black along the top edge. He looks like he just found out summer vacation is over.

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. Lanard's Spit Balls even had one called Crybaby, so Sad Lad had at least one cousin who understood him.

Sad Lad 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 Pigulus. Nobody put a maker's name on them, and I have never found who made the series. They are definitely neat.

🖼️ The Curse of the Crying Boy

Sad Lad always makes me think of the Crying Boy, the saddest face that ever hung over a sofa. It was a mass-produced print of a painting by the Italian artist Bruno Amarillo, who worked under the name Giovanni Bragolin, and from the 1950s on it was everywhere, along with a whole run of other tearful boys and girls. Then on September 5, 1985, the same year Topps put out the Garbage Pail Kids, the British tabloid The Sun reported that a firefighter in Essex, England, said copies of the painting kept turning up undamaged in the ruins of burned houses.

That was all it took. The legend spread that the Crying Boy was cursed and would burn down any house that hung him, and by the end of November The Sun was holding mass bonfires of the prints, sent in by readers who wanted them gone. Later stories named the boy Don Bonillo or Diablo and tied him to a string of fires, even one at the painter's studio, but the journalist David Clarke says those tales did not appear until a book came out in 2000. In 2010 the comedian Steve Punt took on the curse for his BBC Radio 4 show Punt PI and had the prints tested at the Building Research Establishment. The answer was a varnish with fire retardant in it, and the string holding the picture burned through first, so the print dropped face down on the floor and came through the fire.

So Sad Lad is part of a long tradition of sad faces nobody can quite get rid of. I promise he has never set anything on fire.

📌 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 friend who is always a little gloomy, or anybody who grew up with Madballs.