Bazooka Joe and His Gang Page 5

The character of Bazooka Joe was co-created by Woody Gelman and illustrator Wesley Morse. When the first issue of Circus (subtitled “The Comic Riot”) was published by the Globe Syndicate in June 1938, the lineup of creative talent was a veritable comics pantheon: Basil Wolverton (Disk Eyes and Spacehawk); Jack Cole (Peewee Throttle); Will Eisner (Jack Hinton); Bob Kane (Van Bragger); and Wesley Morse, represented with his Beau Gus feature. The comic was edited by Monte Bourjaily as a showcase of possible syndicated features, but folded after three issues. As the other artists in Circus found fame, Morse vanished into obscurity, working in theater and nightclubs outside of comic books. Eventually Gelman tapped Morse for Bazooka Joe, having been a fan of his early magazine and newspaper illustration work.

  Morse worked in a style not that dissimilar from Gelman’s own cartoon roughs (suggesting the possibility that many of the early Bazooka Joe strips may have been based on Gelman’s layouts). Gags were rewritten from joke books, gag files, and the joke columns of magazines such as Boys’ Life. Topps staffer Len Brown, the co-creator of the company’s Mars Attacks card series, did the line editing on Bazooka Joe from 1959 to 1964.

  The name Bazooka Joe has an origin curiously akin to the name origins of the Fawcett Comics titles and characters. After World War I, W. H. “Captain Billy” Fawcett returned to Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where he began producing a small newsletter of military banter and jokes, circulated among the disabled at the local veterans’ hospital. Soon it was distributed by a wholesaler to drugstores and hotel lobbies, where this cartoon and joke publication caught on with its saddle-stitched, digest-size format. The title Capt Billy’s Whiz Bang combined Fawcett’s name with the nickname of a destructive World War I artillery shell, both of which had been pretty much forgotten by the time the magazine was mentioned in the 1957 song “Trouble” (from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man). Monthly sales of Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang reached half a million, and in 1940 the words in the title were split apart to name the characters and books at Fawcett Comics: Captain Marvel, Billy Batson, Whiz Comics, Slam Bang Comics. Like Capt Billy’s Whiz Bang, the title character of the Bazooka Joe strip combined the name of Topps head Joe Shorin with the World War II weapon. But there’s an earlier pop culture connection—the comedian Bob Burns, aka the Arkansas Traveler. Burns made his radio debut on Rudy Vallee’s The Fleischman Hour, which aired from 1929 to 1939. After several guest shots with Vallée, Burns joined the Bing Crosby-hosted Kraft Music Hall in 1936, continuing as a featured performer (along with George Murphy and Jerry Lester) for the next five years on this popular NBC musical-variety series. Finally, just as the United States entered World War II, Burns got his own program, The Bob Burns Show, in 1941.

  One of Burns’s gimmicks was a musical instrument constructed of a funnel attached to a gas pipe. He called this a bazooka, and by the end of the thirties, the Burns bazooka had achieved such nationwide fame that the word was adopted for the army’s similarly shaped rocket launcher. Webster’s, in defining the weapon, offers the following as the word origin: “a crude musical instrument made of pipes and a funnel.”

  Bob Burns Kazooed Bazooka, c. 1940.

  Joe Shorin, c. 1924.

  “Bazooka Paint with Water,” activity book, 1983.

  When a demonstration of the new rocket gun was held for General Somervell and a group of officers, a captain remarked, “That damn thing looks just like Bob Burns’s bazooka!” The observation brought a round of laughter from Somervell and the others, and from that point on, it was always known as a bazooka.

  But how did Burns invent his bazooka, and why did he label it with this peculiar word? It all happened on a fateful day in Arkansas over one hundred years ago. In a letter to Charles Earle Funk (published in Funk’s 1950 book Thereby Hangs a Tale), Bums explained how he coined the word shortly after inventing the instrument: “In 1905 our string band was practicing in back of Hayman’s Plumbing Shop in Van Buren, and while we were playing ‘Over the Waves’ waltz, I broke a string on the mandolin. With nothing else to do, I picked up a piece of gas pipe, inch-and-a-half in diameter and about twenty inches long. And when I blew in one end, I was very much surprised to get a bass note. Then, kid-like, I rolled up a piece of music and stuck it in the other end of the gas pipe and found that sliding it in and out like a trombone, I could get about three ‘fuzzy’ bass notes. The laughter that I got encouraged me to have a tin tube made that I could hold on to and slide back and forth inside the inch-and-a-half gas pipe. Later on I soldered a funnel on the end of the tin tube and a wire attached to the funnel to give me a little longer reach. No doubt you have heard the expression ‘He blows his bazoo too much.’ In Arkansas, that is said of a ‘windy’ guy who talks too much. Inasmuch as the bazooka is played by the mouth, it’s noisy and takes a lot of wind. It just seemed like ‘bazoo’ fitted in pretty well as part of the name. The affix ‘ka’ rounded it out and made it sound like the name of a musical instrument—like balalaika and harmonica.”

  Bubble gum is also played by the mouth, noisy, and takes a lot of wind, so the Topps product, it might be noted, brought much of the original meaning, as conceived by Burns, back to the word.

  Burns was twelve years old when he coined the word “bazooka,” and certainly it’s an odd quirk of fate that he hit on this at the same time Frank Fleer was stirring up his first batches of Blibber-Blubber. Decades later, the competition between the Fleer Corporation and Topps escalated to such intensity that the rival firms began battling it out in courtrooms to protect their fortunes.

  Speaking of fortunes, background on this feature requires yet another journey back in time, since Bazooka fortunes have a distinct relationship to fortune cookies. Some chewers divine future events in Bazooka fortunes the way others receive oracular instructions from / Ching hexagrams, but the bottom line was simply expressed by Woody Gelman: “Kids love fortunes.”

  In thirteenth-century China, rice paper was inserted inside steam cakes as a means of transmitting messages about civil uprisings (and no doubt secrets were kept by eating the message along with the envelope). Fortune cookies, known in China as chien ya bing (“label-speaking cakes”), are believed to have originated in an ancient Chinese parlor game. Chinese immigrant David Jung introduced the label-speaking cakes to the United States shortly after William Wrigley, the man who revolutionized gum advertising, distributed fourteen million of his Mother Goose booklets (“Jack be nimble / Jack be quick / Jack run and get your / Wrigley stick”) in 1915-16 “to the children of the world—from 6 to 60.” After acquiring every American telephone directory printed in 1915, Wrigley mailed four free sticks of gum to all 1.5 million listings, and tried this trick again in 1919—when the number of phone subscribers had swelled to seven million.

  Jung had a more modest advertising budget when he opened his Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles in 1918 and hired a Presbyterian minister to abbreviate verses from the Bible for cookie insertion. Times have changed. While fortune cookies continue to carry lines like “Opportunity knocks only once,” it is possible to find some offbeat one-liners on fortune slips these days, such as “Your friends have a pleasant surprise for you.” After dining at a Chinese restaurant back in the 1980s, I cracked a cookie that contained this paradoxical, Philip K. Dick-like dictate: “Destroy this fortune before reading it.”

  It’s easy to envision Woody Gelman conjuring up the concept of Bazooka fortunes while sitting in a Chinese restaurant, although no one recalls this historic moment from 1953. The contemporary connection between Bazooka and fortune cookies is by cartoonist Mark Newgarden. Before his Topps tenure, Newgarden wrote funny fortunes in 1977-78 for the Goldberg Fortune Cookie Company. His gags for Goldberg were distributed to stores in a Milton Glaser-designed package.

  The Bazooka fortune that reads “Help! I’m a prisoner in a bubble gum factory!” was among the batch I wrote for Topps back in 1972. In November 1987, a young woman in Los Angeles opened a piece of Bazooka gum, read the fortune, and became concerned about this desperate p
lea. Distressed, she picked up the telephone and dialed the Topps offices. The switchboard operator passed the call on to Newgarden, who somehow managed to calm the woman and assure her that no Bazooka fortune writers were chained and shackled in the sublevels of Topps.

  Coincidentally, there’s another food product with a “Joe” character. Little Joe, grits dispensed by the Northern Illinois Cereal Company in 1930, used an illustration of a kid wearing a tie about to dig into his bowl of grits. But Little Joe’s only resemblance to Bazooka Joe is the tuft of hair over the forehead. It’s more probable that Gelman and Morse were influenced by the kids in Ad Carter’s Just Kids comic strip (1923–57) and Gene Byrnes’s memorable Reg’lar Fellers (1917–49). By the 1940s, the Byrnes strip had reached such peaks of popularity that his kid gang stepped in as summer replacements for Jack Benny with the 1941 Reg’lar Fellers radio show and then, armed with wooden swords, marched through backyards to spread World War II propaganda in the hardback Reg’lar Fellers in the Army (Brockway, 1943). This book, highly prized by youngsters in the mid-1940s, interspersed color comics with black-and-white combat photographs.

  Reg’lar Fellers, the Our Gang comedies of Hal Roach, and Bazooka Joe all have dog characters in supporting roles. The ubiquitous dog with a ring around its eye can probably be traced back to silent-film comedies, and one obvious forerunner from that same period is Bingo, the pooch seen with Jack the Sailor Boy on Cracker Jack boxes. When the boy and his dog first appeared on the boxes during World War I, Jack was modeled after the grandson of Cracker Jack founder Frederick William Rueckheim, and the dog was inspired by a children’s song with a line about a pet dog (“… and Bingo was his name-o”). Rueckheim’s grandson died of pneumonia at the age of eight, and the sailor boy trademark became Rueckheim’s own personal Rosebud. If you go to St. Henry’s Cemetery in Chicago, you can see the image of Jack the Sailor Boy engraved on his tombstone.

  Reg’lar Fellers featured Bullseyethe Dog, and the tradition of a dog with a ring around its eye continued in Bazooka Joe with Walkie-Talkie. The Reg’lar Fellers radio show cast included an actor named Orville Phillips, and a character named Orville (aka Pesty) turned up in the Bazooka Joe lineup. There are also links between Fleer Funnies and Reg’lar Fellers. Pud, the star of Fleer Funnies, is a fat kid who wears a red-and-white-striped V-neck sweater, while the Byrnes strip not only featured a plump kid in a red-and-white-striped V-neck sweater, it also had another character named Puddinhead.

  Reputed Dubble Bubble inventor Walter Diemer (who remained on the Fleer board of directors after his 1970 retirement), stated that Fleer Funnies became an addition to the Dubble Bubble package “to make our product distinctive” from imitations (which appeared within three months after Dubble Bubble was first marketed during the Christmas holidays of 1928). Yet today, some people still get the characters of Fleer Funnies confused with the Bazooka Joe gang. Perhaps it’s because they both inhabit reduced-scale worlds of similarly shaped paper ephemera, deftly described by Richard Meltzer in his critique of “two-dimensional visual amusement” titled “It All Started with Pud” (in Frank Lunney’s Syndrome no. 3 from 1973).

  Unlike trading cards, notes Meltzer, bubble gum funnies had a throwaway aspect, but “everybody but everybody came in contact with Pud.” Bubble gum funnies provided a common denominator, a Prairie City where we all lived—only it wasn’t a city: “Pud’s place was rural, semi-rural, suburban, semi-urban, anything. It just wasn’t a real hardcore city, that’s the only thing it wasn’t as far as mere geographical abstraction goes.” Tiny rectangles inside rectangular counter display boxes, around the corner at the corner store, and from these rectangles one grew up and expanded geometrically, as Meltzer visualized it.

  Wesley Morse lived in this world of rectangles. During the 1950s, Morse filled in one Bazooka Joe panel after another through the last eight years of his life. When Morse died, he was not replaced until decades later. Kids grow up, creating a continual turnover among consumers, so it was decreed by Topps management that the seven-year backlog of strips was sufficient. Bazooka Joe went into reruns, and the Morse output was recycled for the next generation and even the next. In truth, Topps never needed seven years of Bazooka Joe. The stockpile accrued because of Gelman’s generosity; he continued to generate the assignments for Morse because he knew he needed the work. During that period, Morse released two to three series of Bazooka Joe strips a year until his death in 1963.

  Wesley Morse Bazooka original art, 1956

  Cover from a Wesley Morse Tijuana Bible, c. 1939.

  Few facts about Morse are available. He drew chorus girl cartoons, and the female figures he rendered in Beau Gus certainly indicate his anatomical aptitude. He also worked for a New York newspaper, and one source suggests this was Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Graphic (1924-32), famed for its use of “composographs”—composite photos of posed models and real people (speaking dialogue in hand-lettered balloons), created by the Graphic’s Harry Grogin to depict unphotographed news events. However, there’s no mention of Morse in Lester Cohen’s The New York Graphic—The World’s Zaniest Newspaper (Chilton, 1964). And since no one is giving out grants for dissertations on the aesthetics and creators of bubble gum funnies, the details of Morse’s life remain a research problem.

  What is known is that Morse played a key role in the true underground of American cartooning—the eight-pagers (aka Tijuana Bibles) of the 1930s. According to Donald H. Gilmore in his four-volume Sex in Comics study (Greenleaf, 1971), “there were apparently only twelve artists involved in the vast majority” of the more than seven hundred different eight-page erotic comics created between 1930 and the early 1950s.

  Morse, so said some who knew him, was one of the original Tijuana Dozen; the others in the group have managed to remain anonymous. These artists delighted in putting famous syndicated comic strip characters in the bedroom, yet after the 1952 debut of MAD and its comic strip satires, the eight-pagers became antiquated artifacts, a transition hinted at by Harvey Kurtzman on his “Comics Go Underground” cover of MAD no. 16 (October 1954). The second panel shows “a comic-book publisher, whose books have been banned from the newsstands, secretly peddling his comics on a busy street corner” and in the first panel, a “Comic-Book Raid,” a drawing highly reminiscent of the 1935–39 raids and seizures at the eight-pager warehouses. Foreshadowing the end of the eight-page movement was a 1950 Dragnet radio episode in which Joe Friday (Jack Webb) and Sergeant Ben Romero (Barton Yarborough) discover that a Holy Bible printing plant is actually a front for the publication of Tijuana Bibles.

  In 1983, Topps decided to update and modernize Bazooka Joe with about forty new strips drawn by cartoonist Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby). So the character grew up and became a teenager. Rock bands, video games, and other topical references were added in new gags submitted by Cruse, Newgarden, Peter Bagge (Haie, Neat Stuff), J. D. King (Twist), Jay Lynch (Bijou, Wacky Packages), and John Holmstrom (Punk, High Times). Filmmaker and Blondie comic strip writer Chris Hart, son of longtime Topps contributor Stan Hart (scripter for MAD and The Carol Burnett Show), also wrote gags for the Joe revamp. “The problem with doing these Bazooka Joe gags,” recalled Cruse, “was that you couldn’t have any continuity—each one had to be drawn as if it might be the first anyone had ever seen. You couldn’t have any running gags. The only direction I was given was that this guy was now a teenager.

  Howard Cruse Bazooka Joe model sheet for 1983 revamp.

  Howard Cruse Bazooka Joe model sheets for 1983 revamp

  Earlier he had been some little pipsqueak age. They presented me with a set of characters and said, ‘Create an image.’ They gave me samples of the old strip with all the characters as kids, and they said, ‘The main thing is: He has to have his eye patch.’ The punkiest thing was that character who has black sunglasses and spikey hair. He looks sort of like a variation on that obnoxious guy in Buzzy Comics. Some of the characters were totally new. I think there were about eight or nine characters that the
y got me to do model sheets on, and then they sent them out to these various gag writers. The character Bazooka Joe doesn’t have an opportunity to develop any kind of distinctive personality because each gag has to stand one hundred percent on its own.”

  At one time or another, you’ve probably asked yourself, “Hey! What’s the deal with Bazooka Joe’s eye patch? Can he see okay?” The answer is yes. “He’s really got twenty-twenty vision in both eyes,” said former Topps president Joel Shorin. To trace this one, we have to go all the way back to 1947 when Harold Rudolph wrote a book titled Attention and Interest Factors in Advertising. One of Rudolph’s notions was that photos with story elements grab attention, and advertising man David Ogilvy remembered this passage from Rudolph’s book while creating ads for Hathaway Shirts during the mid-fifties. Ogilvy put an eyepatch on model Baron George Wrangell, and the Hathaway Shirt man became one of the most famous ad campaigns of the decade. To satirize the Hathaway ads, Woody Gelman asked Wesley Morse to put an eye patch on Joe. Yes, it was that simple, folks. And it makes perfect sense. For a kid, Joe’s eye patch is an attention getter and interest factor, and so is the turtleneck covering the lower half of Mort’s face. In fact, these are the most memorable aspects of the strip. Just as people who have not seen an E.C. horror comic in thirty-five years can summon up a memory of the Old Witch while forgetting the specifics of any E.C. horror story, former gum chewers who haven’t opened a piece of bubble gum in decades can usually remember Mort’s odd apparel. The gags are forgettable, but Mort’s sweater is not. Strange then that this distinctive feature was eliminated in the 1983 revamp. This parallels the 1974 Wonder Woman made-for-TV movie in which Cathy Lee Crosby (as Wonder Woman) was costumed in star-studded sleeves and a plain minidress. The audience only knew this was Wonder Woman when someone said, “Hey, Wonder Woman!”