Boy, 9, nearly blinded by exploding joke pen in birthday party prank

By Andrew Levy

Prank: Daniel Snelling, 10, from Southend in Essex was injured after an exploding joke pen blasted his face

A boy of nine was nearly blinded after opening an exploding joke pen.

Daniel Snelling was left screaming in pain when two other children handed the novelty item to him as a prank at a birthday party.

Debris from an explosive pellet hit the schoolboy in the eye when he pulled off the cap, turning one of his irises black.

Doctors fought to save his eyesight by neutralising the alkaline mixture of gunpowder and grit contained in the cap - described as being more dangerous than acid - and removing the particles with tweezers.

Daniel spent two weeks off school recovering, needed regular check-ups and still needs 28 eye drops every day.

The shop that sold the pen and its suppliers have been fined almost £8,000 in total after admitting supplying unsafe toys, including exploding packs of gum and lighters.

Describing the incident, which happened in July last year, Daniel, of Southend, Essex, said: 'I opened it and I was screaming with my hands over my eyes. It was burning.

'My dad took me to the men's loos to wash it. One of the boys came in and kept saying sorry.

'We drove to hospital and when I looked at mummy and daddy all I could see was a bright yellow light.'

His mother Angela, 37, who works in a toiletries shop, said: 'We were dropping my daughter off at a birthday party and two older boys gave him the pen.

'I was standing right next to him at the time. One of the boys said "This is our pen - we can't get the lid off".

Enlarge

The exploding pen bought from a joke shop in Southend which injured Daniel

'I thought the worst it would do is squirt water. It went off with such an almighty bang and a flash. He started screaming that it was burning his eyes.

'We took him to casualty and on the way to hospital I eventually managed to get him to move his hands away from his eyes. He has pale green eyes, just like his dad, and the iris in one of them had turned black.'

She added: 'I find it astonishing that such things are aimed at children.

'The gunpowder was mixed with grit because it needed something to spark against. The mix was alkaline and doctors said that was worse for eyes than acid.

'They said Daniel had a blast injury as if he had been in a war and a hand grenade had gone off.

'It burst his blood vessels. He was a very lucky boy not to have lost his sight.'

Mother-of-two Mrs Snelling, who is married to Paul, 40, a postman, added the bang had been so loud she had even seen her GP to make sure her hearing hadn't been affected.

Daniel's iris returned to its normal colour after six weeks but he needed regular check-ups with a specialist for four months.

He must have yearly eye tests to monitor the health of his eyes and vision and to check for glaucoma - a possible side-effect of blast injuries.

The black joke pen was made in Taiwan and the packaging was marked with CE - the European safety mark.

Supplier Funnyman Products Ltd, of Ilford, Essex, was fined a total of £5,264.70 for supplying unsafe toys at Southend Magistrates Court on July 28.

A spokesman refused to comment yesterday.

The Southend shop that sold the pen, Gaiety Bazaar, was fined £2,700 after pleading guilty at an earlier hearing.

The case was brought by Southend Borough Council.

Ian Robertson, the councillor responsible for public protection, said: 'This really is a horrible case of a child being injured by a seemingly harmless toy.

'I cannot emphasise enough how careful shop owners must be when it come to ensuring they know and trust their suppliers, especially when it comes to children's toys.'

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When Wacky Packages ruled

By Todd Leopold
CNN

(CNN) -- I blame Wacky Packages for making me the man I am today.

Though there have been attempts to bring them back, Wacky Packages' heyday was in the early '70s.

more photos »

At 9 years old, I became hooked on the Topps-brand sticker series of product parodies, which recast Cap'n Crunch as "Cap'n Crud" and Nestle's Quik as "Nutlee's Quit" ("Explodes Instantly with Milk").

From there, it was a short trip to Mad magazine, "Saturday Night Live," National Lampoon, punk rock, trolling used-book stores and record stores, and indulging in other mind-rotting activities (memorizing trivia, creating puns) until I became the skeptical, disillusioned writer you have before you.

So, to Wacky Packages, I can only say: Thank you. Gallery: Some Wacky Packages products »

Not that Topps, or more specifically illustrator Art Spiegelman and writer Jay Lynch -- goaded by Topps' Woody Gelman and Len Brown -- knew the import of the work. In the preface to the new book "Wacky Packages" (Abrams), a collection of the first seven series of the Topps cards, Spiegelman -- yes, the same Art Spiegelman who won a Pulitzer Prize for "Maus" -- remembers the creation of Wackies as being "a dream job," but something that would probably be forgotten.

"It was all done as Part of a Day's Work, much like the way early comic books were made: they certainly weren't made as art, they weren't sold as art, and they weren't thought of as art," he says in the book's introduction. "Wacky Packages just formed an island of subversive underground culture in the surrounding sea of junk."

Lynch, a childhood friend of Spiegelman's who worked on Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids and other Topps series, agrees.

"I didn't know they were that memorable until about 12 years ago, with the Internet," he says in an interview. (Several Web sites have been devoted to the cards, notably Greg Grant's Wacky Packages pages.) "Before that, I didn't think of it as any more important than the other series."

Lynch says that in the beginning, he and Spiegelman earned eight dollars for their basic gags, which would later be fleshed out into paintings by illustrator Norm Saunders or one of the Mad crowd. (They got $50.) Eventually, Topps raised the price of a rough to $20: "Art used to say, 'I like to think of it as drawing twenty-dollar bills,' " Lynch remembers.

It wasn't much, but since he and Spiegelman were barely out of their teens when Wackies peaked, it did the job: "A rough would buy a week's worth of groceries," Lynch says, and they'd get to eat their models.

At their 1973-75 zenith, Wacky Packages were a phenomenon. The stickers made the cover of a 1973 issue of New York magazine (by coincidence, the same issue included an article on Mad, then at its Nixon-roasting height), and were also written about in The New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. Lynch remembers Wackies outselling baseball cards one year. iReport: Show us your Wacky Packages collection

"This was before satire became a national industry," Lynch recalls. "It wasn't like, every day, a thousand people would mock Tide."

Some companies would issue cease-and-desist orders, he recalls, but since they usually gave a 90-day window to pull the offending card from the shelves -- and the gum that accompanied the cards was supposed to be on sale for only 90 days -- the orders were effectively moot. (You can make your own gum joke here.)

As with all fads, Wackies eventually ran out of steam, and Topps moved on to other series: "Happy Days" cards, the Garbage Pail Kids and superheroes among them.

But the memory lingers.

"Anything that happens when you're eight years old can mark you for life -- just ask Sigmund Freud!" Spiegelman says in the book's introduction. "Wackies were a young child's first exposure to subverting adult consumer culture.

"Now," he adds wickedly, "thirty-five years later, that generation has matured into adults who can afford to nostalgically consume a deluxe volume brimming with that subversion. Yessirree -- I am proud to have been a worker in the debased basement of the great temple of commerce that is America's popular culture."

Oh, don't sell yourself short, Art. There's a whole generation you've warped, too. And I, for one, can't be more pleased.

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