Artist on ‘Topp’ of his game
Wheaton works up an edited sketch for the Lorna Doom Wacky Package concept.
A Fred Wheaton sketch starts the process of creating the concept for a Wacky Package.
Cutline
This is the original sketch Fred Wheaton presented for Lorna Doom. His editor wanted the zombies to be less scary and instead goofy in appearance.
Wacky Packages in various stages of completion and the products that inspired them pepper Fred Wheaton’s desk.
Fred Wheaton has reached acclaim among the Topps artists as seen by his inclusion in the Artists on Demand cards. Lucky Wacky Package purchasers have an opportunity to find randomly inserted cards hand-drawn and signed by the artist.
The artist at work. Fred Wheaton creates conceptual drawings at a drafting table in his home.
By Tara Kinsell
Plunking down pennies on the counter, a young Fred Wheaton claims his bounty. Ripping into the waxy paper cover a familiar smell reaches his nostrils. He pulls out a nearly petrified sheet of gum, snaps it into fragmented pieces, and starts to gnaw on it as he flips through the rest of the contents. He chuckles to himself. Little could he have known that 30 years later he’d be bringing the same anticipation and amusement to a new generation of kids hooked on the Topps Trading Card Company’s Wacky Packages.
Wheaton, a 1984 Waynesburg High School graduate, is a Topps artist who is renowned for his work on Wacky Packages and the Topps Garbage Pail Kids, a spoof on Cabbage Patch dolls.
Wacky Packages, for the uninitiated, are similar to baseball card packs. Inside would be the gum and six stickers or cards with artwork and text that parodied various mainstream products. Like baseball and football cards, kids would collect and trade them. The product was given a new life in 2004 following a hiatus of 13 years. Wheaton credits nostalgia for its resurrection.
“I became nostalgic for things in my youth, as people in their 30s tend to do. They were big when I was around 8 years old and they were cheap. They were everywhere,” Wheaton said. “They were very appealing and very hilarious to an 8-year-old mind.”
Wheaton said this was the day when the satirical Mad Magazine was in its heyday. Wacky Packages were somewhat of a takeoff of what Mad Magazine was producing on a younger level, he said.
“They were full of satire and parody and full of things that everybody takes so seriously and revealing it for the sham it really is. It was like we were in on this little secret that the adult world was a big joke,” Wheaton said.
When the cards were brought back in 2004, Wheaton had long since walked away from a career in art. He saw it simply as an opportunity to buy them again. “I realized as an adult, ‘ah,’ I can have all the Wacky Packages I want,” he said.
His wife, Renee, saw it as an opportunity to encourage Wheaton to revisit his art.
“They are art driven. Somebody thinks up the parody behind them and somebody has to paint it,” Wheaton said. “When the third series came out (in 2005-2006) she looked at it and said, ‘Some are good; others are not that great. You can do better than this.'”
All of a sudden Wheaton and his wife were tossing around ideas and drawing rough sketches.
“I thought, ‘I’ll submit these and see what happens.’ It happened that the very first New York Comic Con was taking place in 2006. I was living in D.C. at the time. At this point in life I had the confidence I never had starting out as an artist,” he said.
Samples in hand Wheaton caught the train to New York only to find out Comic Con was sold out.
“It was impossible to get in. It didn’t occur to me this would be the case, it being the first one. It was a little disheartening to go all that way and not be able to show anybody.”
Wheaton pleaded his case to a staffer who agreed to take his work to the Topps booth and present it to the editor.
“I had no reason to expect anything would happen but I chose well,” he said. “The editor emailed me to tell me he got my stuff.”
He told Wheaton he couldn’t use any of it but keep at it and paid him a major compliment, comparing his drawing to 60s underground comic artist, Jay Lynch.
“Eventually I sold them some ideas. The paintings were done by other people. In the next couple of years I was bugging him, telling him, “I’d really like to paint, give me a try.”
His persistence paid off. Topps began buying ideas and his paintings.
“It was such a huge thrill. Renee and I collaborated on a lot of the original ideas. She was a huge part of that. It was cool to say this is our idea,” Wheaton said.
His earliest memories of art are copying characters from the Charles Shultz Peanuts comic strip and being the go-to kid for drawing stuff in elementary school.
By the time he entered college at Edinboro University he ‘thought’ he knew about art.
“I had to draw from life and I’d never really done that before. We were taught before you can really draw you have got to learn to see the world around you,” Wheaton said. “That was really an eye opener.”
He moved home after graduation and his parents thought he should have a practical game plan. He didn’t.
“You’ve got to have a fallback if the art stuff doesn’t work out. You’ve got to have a practical skill. My dad gently hammered that into me. I did not have a fallback at all,” he said.
Wheaton moved out and headed to Pittsburgh to live with college friends.
“I knew I wanted to work in art but I had no idea what that meant,” Wheaton said. “I knew what I didn’t want to do, not what I wanted to do.”
Wheaton found himself doing an internship with a graphic arts firm, taking temp jobs, and working at a framing store at the Ross Park Mall.
“I began doing portraits on the side for people I met through the frame shop,” Wheaton said. “They’d come in and ask if I knew anyone who painted portraits and I would take the opportunity to say, ‘Well, as a matter of fact I do.'”
Wheaton’s next work involved drawing illustrations for a company that helped bring new inventions to market. He was tasked with drawing a situation the invention could improve if it existed but not the actual invention.
“You couldn’t show what the actual invention was because they didn’t want someone to steal the idea,” he said.
Next, he illustrated covers for authors who self-published through a vanity press. They looked for illustrators who worked cheaply so Wheaton didn’t make much at this.
During this period Wheaton moved in with his old friend, Wayne Wise, another Greene County native and fellow artist. They began to collaborate on ideas and putting comics together for self-publishing via Xerox copies at places like Kinkos.
“It was pre-Internet and there was a network of people publishing, trading and selling it. It was called the ‘zine culture, ‘zine trading, and ‘zine publishing. There were some with small followings and some grew beyond that,” Wheaton said.
He and Wise were among those who did. They would receive a grant to do a self-published comic book, “Grey Legacy.”
Wheaton was making some money but not enough to really make a living and “it got so disturbing,” he said. Everything came to a head after he attended a comic book convention to self-promote his art. The crowds overwhelmed him. “I had sort of a nervous breakdown,” he said. Looking back on it today, 20 plus years later, he finds his reaction to be “silly” but then he saw art as the cause, at least in part, of his brain shutdown.
“I started to work in the computer field and put art away for a long time, 10 years or more. I met my wife and got married,” he said, noting that she is an artist in her own right. “She was sympathetic to my interest in art and told me, ‘You should get back to that someday.'”
Wheaton said working on deadline, getting the job done when you say it will be, and taking pride in it are the cornerstones to success in any field. It certainly helped when he became a computer technician and later as a manager of other technicians. He credits his father, Fred Wheaton Sr., a self-employed mason, for instilling these qualities in him.
“I am exceedingly proud of him. You can still go all around Greene County and point to stuff he built. He was known for doing good work. That is huge,” Wheaton said. “He taught me a lot without realizing he was teaching me. We were worlds apart and in some ways I learned in opposition.”
Although he didn’t always understand what his son was doing, Wheaton said his dad was always supportive of his decisions.
Wheaton’s life these days revolves around his daughters who are 5 and 8. He said his younger self would have told someone “no way,” if they’d have said he’d be a dad one day.
“I’m more mature and more patient now,” he said. In fact, he went part time at his day job supervising computer techs to spend more time with his “rambunctious” girls.
Wheaton is still somewhat amazed at what has happened with Topps. “When someone writes, ‘I’m a fan,’ it throws me every time I read it. I think I do a good job. A lot of that is that nostalgia,” he said with too much modesty. “Renee was the spark for it all. I am eternally grateful to her for being that spark. There may be times when she regrets it when I’m on a deadline,” he laughed.