A good four years ago I took a look at an extremely obscure Bowman baseball comic called Roger the Rookie Dodger. Other then two sightings in some old REA auctions, one of which was all the way back in March of 1992, and comments from one or two long time collectors, the set of ten comics has been consigned to the dustbin of history. It doesn't appear in any guides, there's no articles about the set that I can find and all the known copies were sourced from the archive of George Moll, the advertising executive whose agency handled most of Bowman's artwork.
The scans in my earlier post were grainy, so details were understandably scarce. Well, a serendipitous message from BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd pointed me to one to a recent eBay action and I pounced immediately. Once I had it in in hand, the haze cleared and in addition to a gloriously large and colorful piece for my collection, some new information has emerged about young Roger and his learning curve. Here then, is this rather amazing comic:
First things first; this does not look like an issued piece, despite some folds. In fact, it does not appear the set was ever sold to the public based on the old REA descriptions and what I'm peeping here. In addition, I've yet to find anyone that's heard of the companion series featuring the Yankees. The timing seems pinned to Spring Training in 1948, which was the first year Bowman produced baseball cards, although they did so before the war as Gum, Inc. I wonder then, if this was intended to get a Bowman brand out to the baseball card and bubble gum buying public ahead of the inaugural set in cardboard livery. It was certainly an attention grabber; the colors are vivid and the whole wrapper measures 8 x 12.5 inches. Once cut the comic would have been a whopping 8 x 9.25 inches; King Size
Blony would have been a massive piece o' bubble gum!
You may notice there was a tie-in with Argosy, which was a magazine aimed at men that was primarily centered on outdoor activities and sports, kind of a cleaned-up "sweaty" pulp. I found a cheap copy of the March 1948 number online, which contains a long article about the whole contest:
I'll append the article at the end of this post, so as not to clog things up too much. There were some newspaper ads as well, published right around the start of spring training (the third week of February), which to me firmly puts the hoped for release date ahead of the first pitch of the regular season, which in 1948 occured on April 19th.
The ads were fairly mundane but help with the timeline; I'm not sure how widespread they were as these were the only two I could find: one from Iowa and another from in Tennessee, although I didn't put more than ten minutes into the task:
Whatever scotched the release of the ten Roger comics and the promised Yankees series is not something I've been able to determine from the Argosy article, which makes no mention of Bowman or Blony.
I'm not sure if they tucked a contest entry form in the March issue as the copy I bought had none, but it certainly appeared in the April issue. I don't have this one but you can see it was included inside:
I promised you the March article and here it is. Check out the Sports Briefs on the last page, there's a pretty cool (and unrelated) surprise there!
This has me thinking a series covering the various Bowman products I haven't really looked at yet might be fun. We'll get to the cards in a Philadelphia minute, i.e. a few posts down the road, I'd first like to examine what Bowman came up with before that, which was plain ol' chewing gum.
