- Bazooka Joe
Bazooka Joe is a
comic strip character, featured on small comics included inside individually wrapped pieces of Bazookabubble gum . He wears aneyepatch , lending him a distinctive appearance.He is one of the more recognizable American advertising characters of the 20th century—and one of the few identifiable ones associated with a candy—Bazooka Joe is joined in his various misadventures by a motley crew of kids including Pesty, a kid with a 1950s cowboy sombrero, and Mort, a kid who always wore his red turtleneck sweater over his mouth. The comics generally consist of soft, kid-friendly jokes, as well as small ads for kitschy merchandise one could purchase with enough comics (and a few
dollar s). From the very beginning in 1954, the bottom of the comics included "fortunes", similar to those one would find in afortune cookie , but with a comedic bent. The Canadian version of the Bazooka Joe comics featured bilingual (English and French simultaneously) text balloons. As with almost all advertising characters of the 20th century who had any sort of longevity, the style of the "Bazooka Joe" comics changed with the times, with Joe eventually adopting more of a 'hip-hop' look by the 1990s, complete with low-slung, baggy jeans.In the early 1950s (somewhere between 1952 and 1954, there is some dispute as to the exact date) the head of Product Development at Topps,
Woody Gelman , approached the cartoonistWesley Morse to create "Bazooka Joe and his Gang". Morse, the original artist on Bazooka Joe, was also the artist for many of the so-called "Tijuana Bible s", or "eight-pagers", which are considered a precursor to the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s.External links
* [http://bazookajoe.com Bazooka Joe]
* [http://www.bubblegum-comics.com/BazookaJoe.html History of Bazooka Joe Comics]
* [http://www.geocities.com/myxzlpyx/bazookajoe/bazooka.htm Bazooka Joe Comics 1954-2000]
* [http://www.geocities.com/myxzlpyx/bazookajoe/bazooka_gang.htm Characters from Bazooka Comics]
* [http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~jimmyk/bazooka_html/ The Bazooka Joe Page]
* [http://www.creativity-portal.com/becreative/articles/bazookagum.html Hats Off to Bazooka Joe]
* [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/24/earlyshow/living/main590162.shtml Bazooka Joe Turns 50]
* [http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a961122c.html Bazooka Joe's Patch Explained]
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