Gross out

''I REMEMBER HOW it felt, at the time, to open those first packs of Wacky Packages stickers: delicious, incredible, pleasurable in the way that only something truly wrong can be,'' recalls novelist Michael Chabon in the December issue of Details magazine. Chabon, author of ''Wonder Boys'' and ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,'' was 10 years old in the spring of 1973, when Topps Chewing Gum released an instantly popular series of peel-and-stick stickers that parodied familiar brands: Crust toothpaste, Weakies cereal (''Breakfast of chumps!''), Band-Ache strips, Grave Train dog food, you name it. Art Spiegelman wrote the jokes, and his fellow underground comix artists-including Kim Deitch and Bill Griffith-contributed to subsequent series of the stickers.

But their subversive irreverence toward brands isn't why Wacky Packages were a ''pivotal moment in the history of American childhood,'' insists Chabon. The stickers' gross-out humor started a trend that, he argues, is ''bad for kids.''

Thanks to Wacky Packages, today we have everything from toy slime to Garbage Pail Kids stickers to fart jokes in Disney cartoons to the best-selling ''Captain Underpants'' book series-none of which, Chabon hastens to add, are bad in a moral sense. But when he was a kid, he recounts, kids' gross-out humor ''was a kind of code, a thieves' argot ... a principal means by which children signaled and celebrated the absence of adults in the immediate vicinity.'' For today's over-scheduled children, though, there's ''no space anywhere in their lives that [is] free of adult supervision, adult mediation, adult control.'' Beginning in '73, according to Chabon, profit-seeking adults learned not only to invoke the greatest pleasure of childhood-being left alone by grown-ups-but to do so in the secret language of children themselves.

''The men who sold us Wacky Packages were like those traders in Hudson's Bay blankets ... whose stock gradually drove out the native product and sent the traditional weaving craft into decline,'' Chabon concludes, waxing hyperbolic. ''We sold out our liberty and gave up control over our ancient heritage of vulgarity for the thrill of seeing it done up in four-color lithography, transferable to a notebook or classroom desk, scented with the sweet dust of bubble gum.''

Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.