Our original art OS2 Garbage Pail Kids are live on WAX!

What’s up, Hive? This post has been a long time coming and regarding my career as an illustrator, this one is a big milestone. You may remember just over a week ago, I chronicled the art my buddy @swarddraws and I did for Topps and @eos.detroit for the Bernventures Garbage Pail Kids release on WAX. The Bernventures packs were a hug success, well received by the GPK’s community and a fun, albeit stressful achievement for the @eos.detroit team. Our dev team handled the website and API implementation code. Following Bernventures, we had a second commitment before us.

The deal was, with the Bernie mittens release, collectors were incentivized to burn their cards. That drove up the rarity for any cards, including base cards, that still existed. Based on the amount of cards burned, there would be a second Golden Mittens release. Those NFT assets would be even more rare at about 1/3 of the initial Bernie packs in volume. One of the tragedies from last fall was that we did five original cards for Topps’s OS2 release. They never made it because of a deadline mixup with WAX, but it was heartbreaking to not see our cards included during that product launch.

Well, redemption finally came. Robrigo managed to convince Topps that our OS2 cards should be included in the mittens packs release. Obviously, I was eager for our cards to ship out to the world, but the mittens pack did need to deliver something special. There were a couple of previous releases like Crash Gordon and Tiger King that were wildly over distributed and minted. The two releases we partnered with Topps on were intended to reinvigorate the collectors market, and the OS2 original art cards were a very necessary addition.

I was able to chose what cards to reinterpret from OS2. My picks were Hot Scott, Tongue Tied Tim, Leaky Lindsay, Greaser Greg and Tattoo Lou. One of the most rewards parts of this project is how open the Topps management has been to creative license and interpretations of the art. The process for coming up with these concepts was pretty much laughing and making jokes over Zoom calls. The original packs from the 80’s said, “5 Digital Cards • 1 Stick of Gum”. The blockchain releases said “5 Digital Cards • No Gum”. I thought it would be funny and tongue in cheek if we included die cut gum as a digital asset and the packs said, “5 Digital Cards • Maybe Gum”. Topps was receptive to that and since the release, that’s been a hit with the community.

One lucky WAX account did receive the 1 of 1 golden mittens, but after ripping my 20 packs, I did score a one of one [as of now] as well. Anthony Verducci, the Topps animator absolutely killed the Mars Attacks card and I was lucky enough to get one. You know Topps is on to something big when even the artists that created the release decide to HODL. I’m picking back up on some @eos.detroit NFT releases, but for now, I wanted to commemorate this pack event and share a retrospective on the journey.