Len Brown, who brought a boyish enthusiasm to the Topps Chewing Gum company, writing about players’ achievements for the back of their baseball cards, helping to create the violent “Mars Attacks” card series and overseeing the development of the “Garbage Pail Kids” stickers, grotesque parodies of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, died on Aug. 11 in Bee Cave, Texas, near Austin. He was 84.
The cause of death, at a memory care facility, was arteriosclerosis, his wife, Abby Demel Brown, said.
“He was the world’s most mature 12-year-old,” the comic artist Art Spiegelman, who worked with Mr. Brown at Topps, said in an interview. “He had a fantastic case of arrested development; he could sense immediately, ‘This is what kids will love.’”
Mr. Brown was only 18 when he began working at Topps part time in 1959. For two years, while he was writing brief biographical notes for the flip sides of baseball cards and handling other projects for the company, he also attended Brooklyn College.
For most of his 40 years at Topps, he specialized in developing new products for the non-sports part of the company. He wrote the backs of the 1962 “Civil War News” cards, which depicted battle scenes; the same year, he successfully pitched what became the “Mars Attacks” cards to his boss, Woody Gelman.
Mr. Brown was inspired by the image of a bigheaded creature in “This Island Earth,” a 1955 film about an alien landing, and Wally Wood’s illustration of U.F.O.s landing on Earth for the cover of the EC Comics title Weird Science.
He and Mr. Gelman brainstormed about what might happen during a Martian invasion and collaborated on what was written on the back of each card.
“When we started trying to conceptualize the story, we would actually think, ‘OK, what else have the movies done?’” Mr. Brown told The Central New Jersey Home News & Tribune in 1996. “‘Giant insects! Let’s put giant insects on the set! How about shrinking rays? Remember “The Incredible Shrinking Man”?’ We used every movie cliché and every pulp-cover cliché.”
The terrifying global invasion played out in 55 vivid cards. But parents’ complaints about the gory incidents that were depicted — a dog being destroyed, for example, as a boy “cried out in horror” — kept them from being distributed nationally.
The series “was withdrawn, returned from wholesale and later became one of Topps’s cult properties, though never a big seller,” Arthur Shorin, a former chief executive of the company, wrote in an email.
More than 30 years later, the director Tim Burton adapted the card series into the 1996 film “Mars Attacks!,” starring Jack Nicholson as the American president fighting the Martian invasion.
The film opened with a scene of burning cattle being attacked by flying saucers — straight from card No. 22. Mr. Brown was pleased with Mr. Burton’s approach, though he disliked the detour into humor.
“It just got to be a comedy,” he told the Syfy channel’s website in 2018. “It didn’t take itself that seriously, and obviously that’s what Tim Burton wanted.”
Leonard Albert Brown was born on Oct. 7, 1941, in Brooklyn to Sarah (Goldsmith) Brown, a bookkeeper, and Jacob Brown, who died when his son was 6.
Len grew up loving comics, rock ’n’ roll and Topps cards. When he was 13, he read a magazine about Davy Crockett that Mr. Gelman had published and contacted him, offering ideas for more magazines. That led to a meeting with Mr. Gelman, whom he would come to regard as a father figure.
After graduating from high school, he was hired as Mr. Gelman’s assistant at Topps. He eventually rose to become the company’s creative director.
His many projects in the 1960s included helping to create a card set devoted to Soupy Sales, the mischievous TV personality. During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Brown was part of the team that created two major sticker series: “Wacky Packages” mocked consumer products, parodying them with names like Cap’n Crud, Jolly Mean Giant and Ratz Crackers; “Garbage Pail Kids” spoofed Cabbage Patch Kids, the wildly popular, round-faced dolls that came with adoption papers.
The idea for the second series arose in 1985, when Topps was trying to get the licensing rights for Cabbage Patch Kids and the deal fell through. “Arthur Shorin said, ‘The hell with them, we’ll parody them,’ like we did with ‘Wacky Packages,’” Mr. Brown recalled in the 2017 documentary “30 Years of Garbage: The Garbage Pail Kids Story.”
Over the next three years, Topps produced a series of twisted stickers that included characters like Adam Bomb, whose head explodes in a mushroom cloud; Bony Joanie, an animated girl skeleton with red pigtails; and Snooty Sam, an Uncle Sam-like figure picking his nose.
“Pound would send in rough sketches,” Mr. Brown told Mental Floss in 2022, referring to the artist John Pound. “We’d look at it as a group and make suggestions like, ‘More snot!’”
The formula worked, and Topps kept creating characters. But all the gore, boogers and toilet humor took its toll. Some schools banned the stickers. CBS shelved a Saturday morning cartoon series days before its premiere in 1987.
In 1986, Original Appalachian Artworks, the company that created Cabbage Patch Kids, sued Topps for copyright infringement. Topps settled, paying more than $9 million, and agreed to make the faces look less like those of Cabbage Patch dolls.
“Topps paid till it hurt,” Mr. Brown said in the documentary. “But it didn’t hurt bad enough to stop us from going forward.”
The company produced the stickers through 1988 and then resumed annual production again in 2003.
Occasionally, Mr. Brown worked outside Topps. In 1965, he freelanced for Tower Comics, collaborating with Mr. Wood, the illustrator, on several issues of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, a comic book series that featured superheroes fighting for the United Nations.
A country music fan, he collaborated with Gary Friedrich on two books, “Encyclopedia of Rock ’n’ Roll” (1970) and “Encyclopedia of Country and Western Music” (1971). He also programmed country-western shows on three radio stations while living in New Jersey beginning in the 1970s. After retiring from Topps in 2000, he moved to Dripping Springs, Texas, near Austin, where he hosted a country music show on the radio.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1990, he is survived by a daughter, Valarie Brown, and a son, Jonathan, both from his marriage to Dianne Denenberg, which ended in divorce; three stepsons, Todd, Eric and Harris Demel; and two step-grandsons.
Mr. Brown was an early reader of “Maus,” Mr. Spiegelman’s graphic memoir about the Holocaust, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. In late 1979 and early 1980, while Mr. Spiegelman was working on the project, he would bring pages into Topps’s Brooklyn office to show Mr. Brown.
“He’d say it was important,” Mr. Spiegelman recalled. “For a long time, I’d take it as a compliment when he’d say, ‘You haven’t shown me any pages in a while.’ He had a good eye.”
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