Book Worms

After a 519-day gap between retail releases that left collectors waiting for seventeen months, Garbage Pail Kids returned to store shelves in July 2022 with the Book Worms series. A surge in card collecting during the pandemic had triggered widespread printer and card stock shortages, forcing Topps to skip previously planned releases like Vacation and Chrome 4 so the manufacturer could honor its contractual commitment to supply Walmart with exclusive Mega Boxes. New brand manager Mark Cruz took the helm just as factory volume expanded rapidly, pushing total production to an estimated 3,635,000 packs across all packaging styles. It was the largest print run for the line in over a decade.

Supply realities still forced compromises on the ground, most notably when sticker stock shortages caused Topps to cancel the planned twelve-pack Value Blaster boxes entirely. That cancellation eliminated the Glue Yellow border parallels, blaster-exclusive panoramic and loaded puzzle sketch cards, and the scheduled GPK Gets Graphic insert set before any reached store shelves. Collectors bought their cards instead through twenty-four-pack Retail Display boxes, hobby Collector boxes, and two variations of the Walmart Mega Box, one stocked in the trading card aisle and the other in the toy department, all sporting packaging art of a kid with a vomit portal. Inside packs was a 200-card base set centered on reading, books, comics, and poetry, with 100 fresh illustrations paired into the classic a and b sticker twins.

Border parallels followed the packaging split, dropping Booger Green cards into retail packs at one per pack and Inkwell Black borders into Collector packs at the same rate, while Moby Dick Gray parallels numbered to 199 and Fool’s Gold Scratch n Sniff cards numbered to 50 surfaced across all pack formats. Retail Display boxes held exclusive Sleep Drool Blue borders limited to 99 copies, along with original series artist Tom Bunk’s ten-card Authors of Their Own Misfortune insert set falling roughly once every three packs. Collector boxes received the deepest assortment of chase cards, including Red Herring borders stamped to 75 copies, box-topper iron-on patches, five Book Marked! reading slogans, eight Wacky Package Prose parodies, and GPK Patch Cards with parallels tiered from base copies out of 199 down to a singular 1/1 FoilFractor. Mega Boxes brought their own twenty-five-card Gross Adaptations insert set, spreading cards 1 through 15 across both box configurations while dividing cards 16 through 25 into distinct toy aisle and card department exclusives.

Sorting through the chase cards required collectors to contend with a few production oddities, starting with the printed wrapper odds that overstated parallel frequencies by double, an old Topps quirk that had recurred on packs since 2015. The base set had no variations, but Gross Adaptations suffered an odd printing error on cards 16 through 25, which carried a trailing lowercase letter a after the card number even though no corresponding b cards were ever produced. Four base painters signed autograph cards for the set, completing 170 copies per card with ten held back for replacements and 160 packed out, but the finished cards lacked serial numbers and landed almost entirely within Collector packs. Sketch collectors also noticed shifts under new parent company Fanatics, whose editorial guidelines banned submissions showing blood, racial stereotypes, urine, or feces, leaving roughly sixty participating artists to supply standard sketches in Retail Display alongside the shaped sketches and triptychs reserved exclusively for Collector boxes.