Trumpy Kardz

ABOUT TRUMPY KARDZ

I created all the Trumpy Kardz in September and October 2025. I researched and wrote all the content on my own. I made the images (illustrations and template) primarily by writing prompts that I fed into ChatGPT then manually editing what it produced in Photoshop and Word. I also wrote, designed and created this website without AI's assistance.

I was inspired to create Trumpy Kardz by two other satirical trading card and sticker sets from my youth:

Wacky Packages

In the late 1970s, when I was about eight, I loved how Wacky Packages subversively caricaturized consumer culture and capitalism. As an adult, I learned that the artwork was drawn by some of the top underground cartoonists of the time. This rekindled my interest in these obscure artifacts of juvenilia that altered my childhood perception.

Garbage Pail Kids

Then, starting in 1985, Garbage Pail Kids both raised and lowered gross-out humor to new levels. As a disaffected Reagan-era teenager, I appreciated how GPK's mutant body-horror shock value turned the culturally infantile Cabbage Patch Kids collectables craze on its ear – then bit that ear off, spat it into a toilet bowl of toxic waste and gleefully flushed it down.

Progenitors

While designing Trumpy Kardz, I did some “research” (loosely speaking) by revisiting my old sources of inspiration. Mainly that entailed looking at oversized card reproductions in the Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids coffee table books. Later, after I'd finished my designs, I read the introductions to each volume written by the great Pulitzer-prizewinning avant garde comics artist Art Spiegelman: a key driving force behind both sets. It was only in reading the GPK book's intro that I learned how he and his fellow artists were in turn inspired by certain irreverent predecessors that were popular during their childhoods.

Ugly Stickers were created in 1965 by two legends of MAD Magazine fame: Wally Wood and Basil Wolverton. Endowing the monstrous creatures with just first names lent them an eerie individuality, bringing them to life in viewers' imaginations.

Slob Stickers followed in 1966 and were drawn by fellow “MAD” man Jack Davis. These innovated the use of alliterative nicknames that included descriptive adjectives as well as explanatory “taglines” for each character at the bottom (just like Trumpy Kardz).

Nutty Initials (circa 1967) were drawn by Wolverton and painted by commercial/pulp artist Norman Saunders (who also painted many Ugly Stickers). These personalized the consumer experience, as kids could collect letters to spell out their own names.

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