Vintage 1980s Biface Gross-Out Pin 📌 Half Monster Half Boy Two-Faced Character, Pin-Back Button in the 80s Gross-Out Spirit

Remember Biface? 🎭 Biface: Half Boy, Half Monster

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Biface Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! One face, split right down the middle. On the left he is a purple monster with a lumpy bulb of a nose, a fang poking up over his lip, jagged teeth and a long drooling tongue. On the right he is a regular kid with neat dark hair, a big ear and a brown eye, gritting his teeth like he is trying very hard to keep the other half in. BIFACE is printed in black along the lower left edge. We have all had days like that.

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 Splitting Headache, a monster with the skin peeled off half of its face, so the half-and-half idea was going around.

Biface 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.

🧪 Dr Jekyll, Mr Hyde and the Deacon

Biface is Jekyll and Hyde on a button, and the story of how that book got written is as good as the book. Robert Louis Stevenson had been chewing on the idea for years. As a teenager in Scotland he started a play about William Brodie, an Edinburgh cabinet-maker, deacon of a trades guild and city councillor who led a secret life as a burglar to pay for his mistresses and his gambling. Stevenson moved to the seaside town of Bournemouth, England, in 1884, and he was stuck in bed there, sick and racking his brain for a plot.

Then one night his wife Fanny woke to him crying out in his sleep. She shook him awake, and he was not happy about it: "Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale." Fanny remembered the first draft taking less than three days. She wrote in the margins that it ought to be an allegory, he stormed off, came back admitting she was right, and threw the draft into the fire so he could not be tempted to save it. Scholars still argue about whether that burning really happened, but the story goes that he started over and rewrote the whole thing in three to six days.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came out in January 1886, sold as a one-shilling paperback, one of the "shilling shockers," and it was an immediate success. The actor Richard Mansfield bought the stage rights, the play ran in Boston and London, and "Jekyll and Hyde" has meant a person with a good side and a shockingly bad one ever since. Biface just wears both on the outside.

📌 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 with two moods, or anybody who grew up with Madballs.