I think it was on this same series that we did some roughs where we colored the eyelids of female characters blue, to indicate eye shadow (the cosmetic...like Maybelline). But whoever did the color put blue eyelids on the male moron characters too. (I think it was the Jokebooks series that this happened on....although it could have been some other mechanically colored Topps series around that time).

So when we saw the printed item, I said to Artie, "Hey! These moron characters look like they have eye shadow on!" And Artie replies nonchalantly, "Aaah...That's OK. They're MORONS!" So I thought that to be quite funny at the time....and ever since then we would color the moron characters' eyelids blue...kind of as a gag...since nobody at Topps at that time really cared about the subtleties of what we were doing on these things anyway.

So the early Wackies were drawn by Sutton from Artie's roughs...and then they were painted by Saunders. Saunders, prior to then, never really worked in this Mad magazine type style that the Wackies were painted in....and certainly never colored a male's eyelids blue in his previous paintings. But the roughs by Artie and I all had the moron characters with blue eyelids....or green eyelids, if we couldn't find a blue magic marker. And I am pretty sure that Norm never really knew why...unless Artie explained it to him . And ultimately, even if the eyelids of these goofy character guys WEREN'T blue on the roughs...Saunders would make them blue...and this Morons with Eyeshadow thing ultimately became a Topps cliche." -Jay