Bazooka Joe and His Gang Read online

  Wesley Morse self-portrait from a letter to Ziegfeld Follies dancer Avonne Taylor, c. 1922–23.

  With the repeal of Prohibition and the arrival on the scene of a new generation of nightclub owners, the speakeasies Morse had frequented gave way to more fashionable venues like the French Casino; the El Morocco; a little club owned by Billy Rose called Casino de Paris; and the Stork Club, where he traded Broadway rumors with gossip-columnist-in-residence Walter Winchell, an old friend from the Daily Mirror and the Graphic.

  Around this time, comics already in syndication were anthologized into book form. One example was Famous Funnies, with the cover art often by Victor Pazmino, Morse’s partner on Frolicky Fables. With publishers competing to come up with the next hot-selling character, in 1938 publisher Monte Bourjaily compiled original material, and the Globe Syndicate published Circus: The Comic Riot. An early “comic book” anthology of strips in development that were waiting for syndication, Morse’s Beau Gus shared the pages with those of such comics luminaries as Jack Cole, Basil Wolverton, Bob Kane, and Will Eisner.

  Despite an ever-evolving portfolio of work, the one thing that never changed was Morse’s bawdy sense of humor. In 1939, he penned some of the notorious Tijuana Bibles, a series of eight-page erotic comics pamphlets, many of which centered around his characters’ naughty escapades at the World’s Fair. Of only two known authors to have been identified by today’s comics historians, Morse’s distinctive scrolling calligraphic line belies his hand. He was perfectly suited to the work, having come out of the era of the speakeasy and unsigned contracts sealed with a handshake. It was illicit, but it was paying work, and that was fine with Morse. His gift for satire and vaudevillian humor runs rampant in the pages of his Bibles. It is in these proto-underground comics pamphlets that he arrived at the style we most associate with him today. One cannot help but wonder if, while producing these infamous Tijuana Bibles, he was even aware that a certain chewing gum company had recently come into existence.

  One name Morse would later be connected to also had a stake in the 1939 World’s Fair. Monte Proser, later known as the owner of the Copacabana nightclub, opened the Zombie Room at the Fair, naming the club after the potent drink he claimed to have invented. Morse depicted Proser’s Zombie Room in one of his World’s Fair Bibles, unaware that during the next decade his cartoon gals would pop up all over Proser’s famous Beachcomber restaurant menus and lead to one of Morse’s most indelible nightclub icons.

  Circus: The Comic Riot no. 1 by Globe Syndicate, June 1938.

  “Bughouse Fables” by Wesley Morse. Pencil, pen, ink, and gouache on stationery, c. 1922–23.

  Wesley Morse–illustrated envelope addressed to Stan Hart, humorist and gag writer at Topps, c. 1955–58.

  By the time the 1930s rolled to a close, Morse had produced some of the decade’s most recognizable and distinctive promotional art, and the theater connections he made during that period led to his becoming the preeminent illustrator of the nightclub era. The new decade legitimized Morse’s anonymous underground work, bringing the recognition he deserved when he found himself freelancing for another Broadway impresario. This time it was Lou Walters, owner of the flamboyant Latin Quarter. As club illustrator, Morse’s drawings of Walters’s handpicked showgirls appeared in virtually every program and menu, giving the Latin Quarter its Gay Paree flair. And then there was the Copacabana. Hired in 1943 by Copa owner Monte Proser to give the club a Brazilian flavor, the logo created by Morse of a sultry beauty beneath a colorful bonnet of fruit has become the most recognized logo of the nightclub era—its Mona Lisa.

  But the decade brought more than artistic acknowledgment; it brought Lucy Anne Olsen. At the age of forty-five, Wesley Morse finally found the woman he wanted to marry, and in 1944 he gave up his bachelor status in favor of wedded bliss. Two years later a son, Talley, was born. Coincidentally, a year after that, Topps gave birth to its own bundle of joy, Bazooka bubble gum. Little could Morse have known then how his path would intersect with that of Topps.

  The man-about-town-turned-family-man continued to work for Lou Walters’s Latin Quarter while illustrating menus and programs for many of New York City’s best-known restaurants and nightclubs, as well as painting watercolor beauties and magazine covers. Never one to shy away from the risqué, Morse continued to take jobs on the fringes, providing content for cheaply printed gag digests produced by underground publishers in Times Square.

  In the 1950s, a climate of repression was on the rise in America. For cartoonists like Morse, the Comics Code Authority had a resounding effect. Created to restrict the type of lurid and often violent material portrayed in comic books, the CCA forced comics companies, artists, and writers out of business. Around this time, Woody Gelman and Topps were looking for an artist to reinvent the comics they wrapped around Bazooka bubble gum. Gelman knew of Morse’s work on those free-expression-of-ideas pamphlets, the Tijuana Bibles, but was such a fan of the art that he didn’t mind the content. His choice of Morse to create a pop poster child for the booming youth culture was based on Morse’s multifaceted output. Little could anyone know that concealed around a hunk of pink bubble gum, within the innocuous wax paper wrapper, was a comic strip authored by one of the art form’s most subversive and enigmatic figures.

  Everything Morse did up until that point paved the way for the distinctive style that gave Bazooka Joe and His Gang its appeal. His glorification of the Ziegfeld girl, the comic strips for Hearst, the bawdy comedy of the vaudeville stage, the pinup art, the pioneering work in the early comics of the 1930s, and the nightclub art of the 1940s were all grist for the Bazooka Joe mill. Combined with antics drawn from his son’s life, the “gang” Morse created with Woody Gelman has become internationally known, and is a fitting legacy for a man who worked anonymously for most of his career. Morse drew the strip throughout the last decade of his life until shortly before his death in 1963, and enjoyed every minute.

  From the Great War to the Great White Way, through the darkest days of the Great Depression, through the coming of the Second World War and into the boom times of the postwar era, Wesley Morse left a lasting impression on the richly varied landscape that is American popular culture. The artist who gave the world the international icon known as Bazooka Joe, although still cloaked in mystery, is now no longer anonymous.

  NANCY MORSE is an award-winning author of seventeen historical and contemporary novels, with titles that include Silver Lady (1980), Where the Wild Wind Blows (2011), and her latest, This Child Is Mine (2012). Her books have been published by Simon & Schuster, Dell, Meteor, and Silhouette, and she has also published independently. She is an assistant editor for the newsletter of a political party in Palm Beach County, and editor of Paw Prints, a community newsletter for dog lovers. Nancy and Kirk Taylor are currently working on a book about the life and art of Wesley Morse.

  KIRK TAYLOR is the curator of the Taylor-Morse Collection, and the great nephew of Avonne Taylor. As an artist and writer, he has had a lifelong passion for comics and their creators, has owned and operated an art gallery, and over the years has exhibited his own work. Recognizing the potential importance of the Taylor-Morse drawings, Kirk carried them with him for over fifteen years before discovering their true significance and beginning the process of bringing them wider recognition. Kirk lives with his wife, Amanda, in the historic German Village of Columbus, Ohio.

  Woody Gelman in 1954, in front of his collection of dime novels from the early 1900s.

  If you had read and collected Bazooka Joe comics during the last sixty years, you might have wondered who was behind creating the quirky-looking characters that populated Joe’s universe. Generations of kids have been Bazooka gum chewers, enjoying its flavor, blowing bubbles, and saving the interior comics for “valuable prizes.” The Bazooka Joe creators have remained largely anonymous over the years, but it’s high time that credit is given to the men who played the largest part in the development, the design, and the execution of this American icon
during his formative years. I would go as far as to say that Woody Gelman was the closest to a real father that Bazooka Joe ever had.

  Woody began his career in animation, moving from Brooklyn to Miami, where Paramount Pictures had a thriving studio in the 1930s. It was there that Woody met Ben Solomon, another animator, and the two men became lifelong friends. Together they were part of a team who worked on early Popeye cartoons, Gulliver’s Travels (only the second full-length animated feature produced), and then the much-loved Max Fleischer Superman animated shorts of the early 1940s.

  Eventually Woody became involved in an attempt to unionize the animators, and when Parmount found out about his activities, he was promptly fired.

  Gelman returned to the New York area and began writing and creating stories for DC Comics. Two of his creations, The Dodo and the Frog, and Nutsy Squirrel, appeared regularly in two funny-animal comic books, Funny Stuff and Comic Cavalcade.

  When Paramount Studios shut down their Florida facility in 1945, Ben Solomon reunited with Woody and the two partnered in an art studio, creating ads and packaging for their clients. One of their first customers was the Joe Lowe Company, who manufactured Popsicle ice pops, a popular line of frozen confections. Ben and Woody created a new cartoon character, Popsicle Pete, who for decades appeared in the company’s ads and on their packages.

  Popsicle Pete attracted the attention of Joseph Shorin, president of the Topps Chewing Gum Company in Brooklyn. Shorin was impressed with Gelman’s work and ultimately offered Woody a chance to join the chewing gum/candy novelty company fulltime. Gelman accepted, but only on the condition that Ben Solomon was offered full employment too. Woody headed to Brooklyn to run the product development department for Topps, and Ben Solomon became the firm’s art director.

  An early assignment at Topps involved developing a kids-friendly comic strip, which would be wrapped around the Bazooka bubble gum product. The character was named Bazooka Joe, after Joe Jr., Shorin’s oldest son. Woody rough-sketched his vision of an all-American-looking young teen and a group of buddies who would make up his gang. A suggestion was made in a meeting that Joe needed something to make him immediately identifiable, and suddenly Bazooka Joe had an eye patch. It was a spoof of a then-current ad campaign in which a male model appeared with an eye patch, above a headline proclaiming him “The man in the Hathaway shirt.”

  To illustrate this series of comic strips, Woody chose a veteran cartoonist-illustrator named Wesley Morse. Gelman was familiar with Morse’s work from collecting decade-long runs of old magazines and newspapers such as Film Fun and the daily New York Graphic. He felt Wesley’s style would reproduce well on the inexpensive wax paper on which the four-color comic strip would be printed.

  Two or three times a year, a series of roughly fifty new Bazooka Joe comics were packaged in the product, along with a fortune and an ad for a toy premium that could be redeemed from Topps by mailing in a collection of old Bazooka comics and some small change to cover the cost of shipping and handling. As a matter of economics, it was decided that after seven years, older Bazooka comics could be recycled, as a new generation had grown up to become the new bubble-gum consumers.

  Wesley Morse would show up at Thirty-Sixth Street in Brooklyn to deliver his latest drawings and to pick up a check for his artwork. Woody arranged for weekly advance payments in the amount of $75 to be paid to Morse. When Wesley became too sick to work, Woody would write the artist a personal check to help keep him afloat. It was just one example of Gelman’s kind heart and of his loyalty to the people with whom he worked.

  I joined Topps in 1959 as an eighteen-year-old assistant to Woody. The product development department did not have a secretary, and Woody needed someone to answer mail, file correspondence, and help with the daily chores that were necessary to keep the department functioning. I still remember my first day on the job back in 1959. Woody stood by my desk with a stack of Boys’ Life magazines. He explained that the last page of every issue was made up of old, stale jokes submitted by readers. I was to read through them and see if any could be edited and worked up as a Bazooka Joe comic gag. Much of the humor of early Bazooka Joe comics came from that old joke page in Boys’ Life. I would type up the selected jokes and get them ready for Wesley Morse’s next visit to the Topps offices. It wasn’t until years later that we finally assigned freelance writers to create original jokes and situations for Joe and his gang.

  Several weeks ago, while watching the nightly news, I learned that the marketing people at Topps were discontinuing the old Bazooka Joe comic strip, which had survived for sixty years. Naturally I was was saddened to hear this. Yet, I’m willing to bet anyone that we haven’t seen or heard the last of Bazooka Joe and His Gang. Just as “Ah-nold” used to say in all of those Terminator movies—“I’ll be back.”

  Pre-Bazooka Joe World War II–era subway poster advertising one-cent Topps chewing gum.

  Topps Teamates trading cards, 1970. Produced for employees and never distributed to the public, there were eighteen cards in all. Featured here are cards no. 4, “Art” (standing, left to right: Jim McConnell, Hal Eisman, Ted Moskowitz, Paul Wuorinem, Rudy Martin, Louisa Fusco, Sid Hassin, Joe Goteri, Ben Solomon; seated, left to right: Liz Reed, Vera Sapsin, and Ray Hammond); and no. 15, “Product Development” (Dave Friedman, Len Brown, Fay Fleischer, Marvin Katz, Richard Varesi, Woody Gelman, and Larry Riley).

  Woody Gelman passed away in 1978, having been one of the Topps Company’s most creative executives. In more than two decades there, Woody was responsible for having a hand in such successful products as the first Topps baseball cards, as well as cards and stickers on Elvis Presley, Wacky Packages, Mars Attacks, Davy Crockett, Hopalong Cassidy, the Civil War, the Beatles, Funny Valentines, football, hockey, basketball, and hundreds of other Topps properties. His creativity, insight, spirit, and great human kindness have always been missed.

  LEN BROWN, former creative director at Topps, where he worked for more than forty years, is a writer and editor best known as the co-creator of Mars Attacks and of the comic book series T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. He lives in Texas.

  Ad featuring mock-up Bazooka Joe gum comic, March 1954. The final version of this comic strip appears on this page.

  Ad introducing Bazooka Joe and His Gang, April 1954.

  Confectionery trade ad, July 27, 1954.

  Confectionery trade ad, September 21, 1954.

  Reproduced for the first time in almost sixty years, here is the complete first series of forty-eight Bazooka Joe comics from 1954. Included in this series are the eight character comics that appear as the opening pages of this book.

  Five-cent store display box, 1950s.

  Two varieties of five-cent foil comics issued in 1954. All subsequent gum comics would be printed on wax paper, except for a brief set on foil released in the early 1970s.

  Major League Baseball yearbook ad promoting Topps baseball cards and Bazooka gum, 1955.

  The Topps booth at the 1957 NATD Candy Convention. Pictured, left to right, are Herman Fine (regional sales manager, southern markets), Joyce Shorin (sales administration manager and daughter of Ira Shorin, one of the four founding brothers of Topps), and Charles Zubrin (merchandising manager) in front of a large Ted Williams Bazooka display.

  Halloween confectionery trade ad, July 15, 1952.

  Topps Halloween sell sheet, 1957.

  Halloween window poster for retailer displays, c.1957.

  Retailer display card found in boxes of 240-count one-cent Bazooka. c.1957. Topps briefly used the work of Al Capp by licensing his Li’l Abner comic strip character for promotion.

  Display header for eighty-count Halloween bags of Bazooka.

  In 1957, Topps released an alternate brand of bubble gum called Blony, featuring licensed Archie comic strips in the same format as Bazooka Joe. Blony had been a popular brand for Gum, Inc. (later Bowman Gum), beginning in the early 1930s, which was eventually sold to Topps in April 1956. In this 1957 premium catalog, Bazooka Joe and Archie
join forces.

  Topps letter from Bazooka Joe and Archie, 1957–58; premium catalog, 1957.

  Archie comics released with Blony, 1957–58.

  Blony box and side panels, wrappers, and unopened pieces of gum, 1957–58. Veronica Lodge, Archie Andrews, and Betty Cooper are featured on the box.

  Hungry Herman of the Bazooka Joe gang is featured on the box.

  Since Topps has sold a billion and a half pieces of Bazooka bubble gum annually and the Bazooka Joe strip is read internationally, surely Bazooka Joe must be one of the most familiar comics characters of the twentieth century. The strip has even had an impact on style and fashion, teaching kids around the world how to wear their baseball caps sideways and pull their turtleneck sweaters up to their noses.