A Garbage Pail Kids card sold for $288,000 on August 28. It topped its own auction night — and it still only ranks second on Cooper Flagg's all-time sales list.

The lot was a 2025 Bowman Garbage Pail Kids NBA Superfractor Cooper Flagg rookie, numbered 1/1, card #BGP-1. It went through as Lot 5 of Fanatics Collect's August Premier Auction, closing at $288,000 with buyer's premium after 34 bids, according to the auction house's own listing. The card is not numerically graded. It carries a CGC authentication, and the listing notes the certification number was checked against CGC's database and was active as of August 14, 2026.

The Record, and What It Is a Record Of

Fanatics Collect announced the result as a new all-time record sale for any Garbage Pail Kids card, and put the figure at 3.6 times the previous high. That claim comes from the company that sold the card, and it is worth naming the category precisely: it is a record across Garbage Pail Kids, a non-sports property that has existed since 1985 — not a record for a basketball card, a rookie card, or a Superfractor.

The comparison points, as reported by Sports Illustrated's collectibles desk on August 28, put the scale of the jump in view. The previous all-time GPK record stood for more than three years: a 2013 Garbage Pail Kids Chrome Series 1 Evil Eddie Superfractor 1/1 in a PSA 10, which sold for $79,999.99 in January 2023. Before that sat the 2020 Garbage Pail Kids Sapphire Edition Adam Bomb Padparadscha 1/1 in a PSA Authentic slab at $52,100 in March 2022, and the record for the 1985 set that started it all — a Nasty Nick Sticker Glossy in a PSA 10 at $27,500 in February 2021.

Inside the newer Bowman GPK crossover the ceiling was lower still. SI reports the previous best was a 2025 Bowman Chrome Paul Skenes GPK Superfractor in a PSA 9 at $28,000, followed by an Aaron Judge at $26,975 in May 2026 and an AJ Dybantsa just under $20,000.

Analysis: Against that set of comparisons, $288,000 is not an increment on a rising category — it is roughly ten times what the Bowman GPK crossover had ever produced, and more than three times what four decades of Garbage Pail Kids had produced anywhere. Two of the four benchmark sales above sit in Authentic or unnumbered-grade holders rather than high numeric grades, which is unusual company for a quarter-million-dollar result. What none of these figures establishes is a trend line; they are individual results on one-of-one cards, and one-of-ones do not have comparables in the way a graded population does.

The Bigger Story Is What Else Sold That Night

The GPK card was not the only Flagg one-of-one in the August Premier Auction. Heavy reported on August 30 that a 2025 Bowman Chrome Superfractor Cooper Flagg #BCV-1, graded PSA 9, sold in the same auction for $252,000 with buyer's premium after 28 bids — Fanatics describing it as the only 1/1 version of Flagg's Bowman Chrome card available in standard Bowman packs.

That reshuffles his public sales table. Per Heavy, Flagg's benchmark remains a 2025-26 Topps Chrome Sapphire Padparadscha 1/1 rookie autograph in a PSA 7, which sold through Goldin for $366,000 in March. The GPK Superfractor at $288,000 now sits second, and the Bowman Chrome Superfractor at $252,000 third. Heavy's framing is worth keeping straight: the $252,000 card was the headline result until the GPK card passed it in the very same auction.

Analysis: The detail worth sitting with is that neither of the two cards that sold in August carries an autograph, while the $366,000 card at the top of the list does. On the conventional hierarchy, an unsigned insert should trail a signed one badly. Here two unsigned one-of-ones sold for $288,000 and $252,000 against a signed one-of-one's $366,000, and one of the two is a cartoon parody in an Authentic holder. Whatever is being priced in these lots, a signature is not carrying it. That is a reading of three data points, not a market rule.

The Card Itself

Per Fanatics Collect's listing, 2025-26 Bowman Basketball marked the first time Garbage Pail Kids spoofed NBA players, with Flagg headlining the insert checklist. He is drawn as "Cooper Flag," the art an homage to Old Gloria — card #241a from Original Series 6 in 1986. The card front carries the Garbage Pail Kids banner, a Dallas #32 jersey, a rookie-card shield and the 1/1 serial in the corner.

Flagg was the first pick of the 2025 NBA Draft and the 2026 Rookie of the Year. The blog covered the property's earlier history in CASE #0016, on the 1985 Adam Bomb — a sticker that argued non-sports cardboard could be culturally significant and collectible long before anyone crossed it with a basketball licence.

What Happens Next

All of this is a rehearsal for September. Fanatics Collect is scheduled to auction Flagg's one-of-one Rookie Debut Patch Autograph in its September Premier Auction, the consignment covered in CASE #0294 and the subject of the WPRI segment in CASE #0295 — the card whose redemption, first logged in CASE #0238, came back a PSA 10.

Sports Illustrated expects that card to set Flagg's highest sale when bidding wraps at the end of September. That is an expectation about an auction that has not happened, and the August results cut both ways on it: they establish deep bidding on Flagg one-of-ones, and they also show that the market has just absorbed two of them inside a single night.

The verdict: a 40-year-old parody property produced a $288,000 sale, beat every other Cooper Flagg card in its own auction, and still finished second on his all-time list. The Garbage Pail Kids record is real and it is Fanatics Collect's to claim. The more instructive number is $252,000 — because it means the $288,000 was not an outlier that night. It was the pair.

Confidence note: The sale price, buyer's-premium basis, bid count, lot number, sale date, card number, CGC authentication status and the Old Gloria homage are taken from Fanatics Collect's own auction listing for the lot. The record claim and its 3.6x multiple are Fanatics Collect's, reported by Sports Illustrated on August 28, 2026, along with the prior GPK benchmark sales and the Bowman GPK comparison figures. The $252,000 Bowman Chrome Superfractor result, the $366,000 Goldin sale and the resulting sales ranking are reported by Heavy on August 30, 2026. Passages marked Analysis are this blog's interpretation of those figures, not findings in the sources.