DALLAS, TX.- They were called, rather tamely, Make Your Own Name Stickers when the frightening five-cent wax packs stormed retailers' shelves in 1966. Kids gobbled them up like the bubble gum that came with The Topps Company's cards — most likely, because their parents absolutely abhorred the evils within.

Only a few years earlier, the legendary maker of sports cards jumped into the creepy-card business with its You'll Die Laughing line illustrated by Mad's co-founding cartoonist Jack Davis. The deft combination of horror and humor, especially its Ugly Stickers, proved an enormous hit for Topps, and by 1967 kids were flocking to the Wacky Packs still being reproduced today.

But few products were as short-lived — and as awesome — as the Make Your Own Name Stickers, which let kids put their friends' (and, better still, enemies') names below macabre renderings of bug-eyed ogres, drooling monstrosities, smirking mutants and beaming brains created by such iconic illustrators as Davis, Basil Wolverton, Wally Wood and Norman Saunders. You could either write in a moniker or use the pre-made stickers provided by Topps — both flattering and frightening!

"They were outrageous, rude and derisive," says Joe Mannarino, who, with wife Nadia, runs Heritage Auctions' East Coast Comic Books and Original Comic Art category. "The monster series was thought to be based on kids' doodles and their far-out imaginations. Parents and teachers hated them, making them an immediate hit!"

Rare are the offerings available today without a "PATRICIA" or "GLENN" or "JULIA" affixed in the blank space beneath the disturbing countenances with tongues sticking out of their driveling, decaying faces. Rarer still are the original artworks for the Make Your Own Name Stickers, which haven't been seen since 1989, when Topps held its now-legendary Important Archival Material auction at Hunter College Sportsplex in Manhattan.




Thirty-one years later, Wolverton, Wood and Saunders' original pieces resurface at Dallas-based Heritage Auctions' Nov. 19-22 Comics & Comic Art event. Five lots featuring all of the icky illustrations are available, each containing several of the grotesqueries created by some of the finest illustrators ever to work in comics (and cards).

Wolverton is responsible for countless creepies over the years, chief among them the legendarily influential — and the surreally, magnificently hideous — cover of Mad's May 1954 issue parodying Life's "Beautiful Girl of the Month." He was the self-proclaimed "producer of preposterous pictures of peculiar people who prowl this perplexing planet," a talent tapped and transcended for The Topps Company in the 1960s.

Wood, another Mad illustrator and one of his generation's most versatile and in-demand artists, counted myriad comics companies among his employers, including Marvel, EC, DC and Gold Key. He also put pen to paper for newspaper strips and ad agencies and Playboy. The man got around — especially elementary school classrooms in the 1960s, when he got to work on the Ugly Stickers and the Insult Cards.

Saunders might be the least well-known of the Holy Trinity of Terror, but he's no less influential. He began working in comics, then made the jump to pulps, paperbacks and men's mags, where his combo platter of sex, murder and spacemen adorned the covers of books with such titles as Saucy Stories, Climax, Dynamic Adventures, New Man and Eerie Mysteries.

By '58 he was working for Topps, first on paintings of baseball players, then as creator of the legendary Mars Attacks cards in 1962. In time he drew everything from Batman to Wacky Packs, while also contributing to the Ugly Stickers that led to the monstrous Make Your Own Name Stickers of 1966.

"Norman Saunders was a master of his craft," says Mannarino.

By making the hideous so frighteningly beautiful — and, after 31 years, so collectable all over again.