Vintage 1980s Mad Marvin Gross-Out Monster Pin 🥃 Bulging Eyeball Pinback Button, Weird Retro Collectible

Remember Mad Marvin? 🧠 Mad Marvin: Brains, Guts and One Loose Eyeball

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage Mad Marvin Pin, Madballs and Garbage Pail Kids Inspired, 1980s! Mad Marvin is my pick for the grossest one in the whole series. His face looks like it is built out of a pile of pink worms, or maybe guts, with a lumpy brain showing on top. One eyeball has popped right out on the left, the other eye is half shut like he does not care, and a long red tongue curls out of the whole mess. MAD MARVIN is printed in black across the top. Kids loved this stuff and I still do.

The front is printed paper under a glossy clear cover, and the back is gray with a brass-colored safety pin.

🤢 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 Aargh, a Frankenstein-looking monster covered in stitches with one eye missing, and Bash Brain, a zombie head with its brain showing, and Mad Marvin looks like the two of them had a very bad day together.

Mad Marvin 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, Pufang, Cat Bat, Hog Head, Ocufungus, Pigulus and Sad Lad. Nobody put a maker's name on them, and I have never found who made the series. They are definitely neat.

⚡ Frankenstein and the Year Without a Summer

A mad fellow pieced together out of spare parts puts me right in mind of Frankenstein. In 1815 the volcano Mount Tambora erupted, and the next year, 1816, went down as the Year Without a Summer. Mary Shelley was 18 and not yet married when she and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It was too cold and rainy to do anything outdoors, so they sat around the log fire reading German ghost stories, and Byron proposed that they "each write a ghost story."

Mary thought for days and came up empty. Every morning somebody asked if she had thought of a story yet, and every morning she had to say no. Then one night the talk turned to galvanism and whether a corpse might be brought back to life. She went to bed after midnight, could not sleep, and saw what she called her "waking dream": a pale student kneeling beside the thing he had put together. That became Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published without her name in London on January 1, 1818, when she was 20. In the book Victor Frankenstein builds his creature one piece at a time from "the dissecting room and the slaughter-house." Byron's doctor, John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre out of that same contest, so one miserable summer gave us two of the great horror stories.

A little more lore for you. On a trip along the Rhine in Germany in 1815, Mary stopped in Gernsheim, about 11 miles from Frankenstein Castle, where a century earlier the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel had carried out his experiments. She never mentions him, and nobody knows if she heard the stories. And the monster brought to life by a huge jolt of electricity? That came mostly from James Whale's 1931 movie with Boris Karloff. In the book the process is left a mystery.

📌 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 horror fan, the biology teacher with a sick sense of humor, or anybody who grew up with Madballs.