Every collector can picture a John Pound painting, even ones who could not name him. Adam Bomb with his thumb on the detonator button, card 8a in the first 1985 series, is his. So are the fronts of the whole first two series. What is easy to forget is how many people have painted Garbage Pail Kids since, and how close the modern artists have come to matching him.
We counted. In our Card Index, the base cards with a known artist credit break down like this. John Pound leads with 1,074 base cards across 24 sets, from 1985 to the reprints and homages that still use his paintings. Brent Engstrom is second with 934 across 45 sets, more sets than anyone, starting in 2006. Joe Simko follows with 646 across 38 sets since 2013, then David Gross with 634 across 44 sets since 2005. Tom Bunk, who joined Pound on the fronts in 1986, has 538 across 32 sets. After them come Joe McWilliams with 344, James Warhola with 208, Junghwa Im with 138, Layron DeJarnette with 85 and Mark Pingitore with 82.
Two things stand out. First, the original painters are still the core of the modern sets: the Chrome reprints, the Flashback series and the anniversary sets keep putting Pound, Bunk and Warhola paintings back on shelves. Second, the artists who came after, Engstrom, Gross and Simko above all, now have more credited base cards between them than Pound, Bunk and Warhola. A collector who started in the late 2000s has grown up on their work the way an older one grew up on Pound’s.
The early run was a team effort beyond the painters. Art Spiegelman and Mark Newgarden developed and edited the series at Topps, Jay Lynch wrote gags and drew card backs, and Tom Bunk drew the backs before he painted fronts.
Every artist has a page in the artist index, with every card we can credit to them. Counts cover base cards with a known credit only, so the real totals are higher.