I loved Garbage Pail Kids when I was a boy. Even now, I couldn't tell you why. I've never liked snot jokes, I wasn't a rebellious child, I didn't collect any other kinds of cards, and I didn't have any younger Cabbage Patch Kid-loving little sisters to annoy. As objects, I think they were interesting: All these semi-adorable, semi-creepy dolls being tormented or behaving badly, with a name-based pun on every single card. They didn't have any real purpose or backstory, and they didn't hold any long-term interest once you took them out of the package and looked at them for a while. Nevertheless, I bought them all the time; I had at least a three-pack-a-week habit, at the height of my Garbage Pail Kid frenzy.

Abrams just put out Garbage Pail Kids, a full-color mini-art book with glossy reproductions of every GPK in the first three series. Fans remember that each kid was named twice, for maximum bilking purposes. Both names are listed below the picture—"Tattoo Lou" is also "Art Gallery," for example—and there's a foreword by GPK creator Art Spiegelman (yes, that Art Spiegelman) and an afterword by the artist who created most of the GPKs himself, John Pound. (Pound says the first series of GPKs were produced in a frenzied rush, at a rate of one card produced as a full-sized painting every day for 44 days.)

And besides a pack of unproduced-til-now GPK cards tucked into the back of the book, that's about it. It's a cute little package, thoughtfully assembled—the dust jacket seems to be made out of the same material that the cards used to be wrapped in, and beneath the jacket on the front cover of the book, you'll find a photograph of a stick of that terrible gum that came in every pack. I can't imagine Garbage Pail Kids is that interesting to someone who didn't collect them as a child, but as a nostalgia item, it's a pretty neat thing, filled with the same weird, light-as-air charisma of the original concept.