'Garbage Pail Kids - Where Are They Now?' - How The Trading Card Characters Look 30 Years Later

For anyone who didn't have their childhood in the 1980s, the Garbage Pail Kids were a series of gross and gruesome trading cards that parodied the cutesy Cabbage Patch Kids range of dolls. It was the mindchild of comic book writer and artist Art Spiegelman, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, and for kids of that era they were pretty much an all-consuming trend.

So popular that you would've traded your younger sibling to get a card you didn't have (there was also a movie which was both terrible and amazing). And now, 30 years on, art director Jake Houvenagle and photographer Brandon Voges have created an awesome series showing some of the most iconic characters as adults.

Voges and Houvenagle even lovingly fleshed out a back story for each character. Writing on his website Voges says:

I was a huge fan of Garbage Pail Kids and had a large collection as a kid. The idea of revisiting them, thinking through their story and shooting these portraits was a dream. We had to make this happen.

From there, we picked cards we thought would be good candidates and squeezed these shoots in when we could. It took us until now to get them all finished -shooting them in studio and on location around St. Louis. These are our first 6, with more in the works. (via)

You can check them out below. And head to Voges' blog to read the back stories.