From jazz to Jerry Lewis, American pop culture has often found a welcome audience in France. But nothing could have prepared the French for the latest U.S. export: Les Crados (The Dirty Ones), the Gallic edition of those Stateside sensations, the Garbage Pail Kids. A gruesome gallery of children's bubble-gum cards, Les Crados include such characters as Mathieu Degueu (Matthew Nosepicker), Herve W.C. (Toilet-Face Herve) and Laetitia Pus-de- Bras (Stinky-Pit Letitia).
Licensed to a French journalist by the New York-based Topps company, which launched their American forebears in 1985, Les Crados are suddenly de rigueur among French schoolchildren. Even though they...