The self-adhesive card depicts BTS members in holes with a bruised face, a Grammy trophy over their heads and a text that says “BTS Bruisers”. The band did not take home any Grammy awards on Sunday.
The collectible and collectible card company initially included the card as part of a Grammy deck of adhesive cards Garbage Pail Kids, a series launched in 1985 as a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. After receiving strong reactions on social media, Topps apologized and said it had removed the BTS image from the deck.
“We hear and understand our consumers who are upset about the BTS representation in our GPK Shammy Awards product and we apologize for including it,” said the company tweeted. “We removed the BTS sticker card from the set, we did not print any sticker card and it will not be available.”
BTS fans, known as BTS Army, expressed their anger and disappointment at the cartoon.
“I just learned about Topps’s disgusting caricature of BTS. That’s not satire. It’s totally racist. For anyone who tries to ignore it as a comedy, describing violence like this against an Asian group in these times is hateful and dangerous . world, “USA Today audience editor Fatima Farha tweeted.
The reaction comes during a time of increasing hate crimes against Asian Americans in the United States. In the past two months alone, there have been at least 500 reports of Asian Americans as targets, with cases ranging from verbal harassment to physical assaults.
Many people criticized Topps for spreading the image the day after eight people were killed in a Atlanta shooting – six of the eight people killed were Asian women, according to officials. Atlanta police chief Rodney Bryant said on Wednesday that investigators are not yet ready to say whether the attacks are being considered a hate crime or not.