Bazooka Joe - Development

Development

Sometime between 1952 and 1954, Woody Gelman, the head of Product Development at Topps, approached the cartoonist Wesley Morse to create Bazooka Joe and his Gang. Morse, the original artist on Bazooka Joe, was also the artist for many of the pornographic drawings collected into so-called "Tijuana bibles" or "eight-pagers", popular in the pre-war period, which are considered a precursor to the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s.

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 a more contemporary look by the 1990s, complete with low-slung, baggy jeans.

Bazooka Joe comics were localized or translated for sale in other countries. For example, the Canadian version featured bilingual (simultaneous English and French) text balloons.

Read more about this topic:  Bazooka Joe

Famous quotes containing the word development:

    For decades child development experts have erroneously directed parents to sing with one voice, a unison chorus of values, politics, disciplinary and loving styles. But duets have greater harmonic possibilities and are more interesting to listen to, so long as cacophony or dissonance remains at acceptable levels.
    Kyle D. Pruett (20th century)

    Sleep hath its own world,
    And a wide realm of wild reality.
    And dreams in their development have breath,
    And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.
    George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)

    This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)