Penny-Wise

Time-travel Saturday kids as we revisit the late 40's and early 50's! 

Topps, in their primordial bubble gum days, planted four comic sets inside of their early one cent Bazooka wrappers: Spalding Sports Show (by Willard Mullin), Historical Almanac (finally properly named after all these years and previously mid-identified as not only Famous Events but also This Date In History), Know Your Sports and Famous Events. Thanks to a recent Love of the Game Auction (hi Al!) and a bit of additonal research, I've been able to determine that the Mullin set and Historical Almanac (which featured a calendar page showing a specific date in history) were printed together in 1949 and appear to be the first comics in what was then the debut of Bazooka one-cents tabs that year.  Furthermore, I now know Famous Events is not calendar-page based and seems to have been printed in 1950 along with Know Your Sports.

They're unfortunately all cut down but in order from the top: Famous Events, Know Your Sports and Spalding Sports Show, all from LOTG:

Shiny was their outside packaging:

Here's Historical Almanac, for reference, from BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd:

It's extremely doubtful all dates can be found and Shep says at least one repeats. None of these are easy to find, so it's all a big mystery as to how many subjects can be found from each series. The fortune on the bottom was a persistent Topps trope for many years with Bazooka comics of all sorts.

Moving into 1951 now, Friend o'the Archive Rob Lifson sent this pic along awhile back, which held penny packs of 1951 Blue Backs and came on the heels of the first series of Red Backs, which in turn were all part of the Baseball Candy set. I've never seen a box with this sticker before and Blue Backs as a whole are about twice as hard to find as Red Backs. As you can see, this was a Topps file copy as there is a stamp indicating it was to be returned to Woody Gelman. These packs actually had caramel in them and should not be confused with the Doubles packs that were reissued without candy a year later by Topps.

Speaking of Doubles packs, a hoard of them were found in bulk in 1983 at a Philadelphia jobber's warehouse and a large supply of them entered the hobby.  The July 8, 1983 edition of Sports Collectors Digest succinctly explained it all:

There were 120 packs per box, so roughly 12,000 packs were unearthed, mostly of Red Backs. I was lucky enough to buy a pack of these, $11 was the price if memory serves.  Still have it too and you can clearly see a Red Back lurks within:

I suspect Bowman got the Baseball Candy set shut down in mid-production, or at least managed to get the distribution stopped in the Philly area, although I've never been able to prove it.  Something clearly happened to it though.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I just love the pre-1952 history of Topps as it's all just so unpredictable!

In The Year Of '49

An almost 72 year old oddity is upon us today campers, as we look at some very early Bazooka comics that are among the biggest obscurities ever issued by Topps.

I've posted previously on R414-1, the essentially unknown one-cent Bazooka comic dubbed Spalding Sports Show (SSS) and featuring artwork from Willard Mullin that was issued, per Jefferson Burdick, in 1949.  That set may or may not be complete at 25 subjects and I'll be damned if I can find a full checklist anywhere.  Well another, similar comic from it has turned up and is intriguing.

I'll show our new comic first, it's kinda batty:

Compare that to a SSS subject:

Not the same issue, nor are the foil outer wraps quite the same.  This is the foil overwrap for our newbie:

It's close to but not quite a match for the SSS foil:

Ignore the differences in albedo, which is just a result of different scan settings, and look near the top.  These wrappers seem identical except for the lack of a white background behind "Young America's Favorite" on the Spalding Sports Show wrapper. There may be a slight difference in the indicia but things are too reflective on the new one to tell for sure..

This points to the next round of comics likely issued just after the initial runs of SSS comics (Topps would print two series at once sometimes for Bazooka comics through 1954 or so but I believe the outer wraps would be consistent when they did so as these were copyrighted).  There is a set known colloquially as Sports Oddities that fits the bill though. I've got a boxing example from what I think is the same set as our 'batty" example above that I have attributed to that name.  This is scanned along with its foil wrapper, which is a match for our newly found treasure:

I think this issue is related to 1949's Know Your Sports, which appeared with the five cent Bazooka rolls of the time.  The penny version just appropriated single panels of the nickel's:

As penny Bazooka tabs started appearing in the late summer or fall of 1949, Sports Oddities seems like a 1950 issue to me but that is up in the air presently.

I'm working on cataloging as much as I can about the very early Bazooka issues for the second edition of my book detailing the early Topps days through 1956.  Other projects are also in the works but this one will likely happen first, so if you have any examples from the pre-Bazooka Joe era, please contact me. I have some but am looking for a larger collection of images to pick from.

R414-1

The American Card Catalog, which is responsible for giving us such nomenclature as T206 and E93, was compiled in a number of editions from the late 1930's until the early 1960's by Jefferson Burdick, with ample help from others, especially in later editions. Here's the cover of my well-worn copy, a 1980's reprint of an invaluable reference:



Topps cards have an "R" designation (for Candy and Gum Cards, the "R" may or may not stand for "recent") are are grouped in the "400" series of set identifiers, indicating a "Recent Candy and Gum Card" sports card set issued since 1948. Topps Baseball Issues are shown in the R414 grouping, their football cards as "R415" and Non Sport cards start appearing in the "700" series of "General Issues". Bowman's baseball issues would have their own set identifier (R406) as Burdick tried to corral a large number of manufacturers into manageable sub-groups.

After the number designator there can appear a dash followed by another number roughly indicating the yearly order of issuance: 1951 Connie Mack All Stars are R414-2, 1952 Topps Baseball is R414-6, 1953 Topps Baseball is R414-7 and so on.

So what, you may ask, was the first Topps baseball issue detailed in the ACC? It is none other than "Bazooka Baseball Cartoons by Mullin, 1949 2 x 2 7/8, wrappers" in Burdick's clipped description of the set. These are nothing more than Willard Mullin cartoons taken from a publication called Spalding Sports Show, which was a radio premium that had pages of Mullin cartoons and a few sporting goods ads within. These neat little publications appeared from the mid 40's until the early 50's and are quite inexpensive to collect. They all feature a stunning array of Mullin's artwork. As a footnote, I believe Babe Ruth was one of the early hosts of this show in 1945.

Here is the cover of the 1951-52 edition (actual size is about 7" x 11") followed by detail of an interior page:





As they often did with the late 40's and early 50's Bazooka wrappers, Topps licensed artwork for their wrapper interiors. For R414-1 they licensed some of the baseball themed cartoons and printed them in sepia on the inside of 1 cent and 5 cent wrappers. Here is the inside and outside of the one cent variety:





I am not 100% certain but I believe 25 of the Mullin cartoons graced Bazooka Wrappers in the days before Bazooka Joe. There is a little bit more info here on these wrappers.

I also stumbled across this offering from Columbia City Collectibles when researching this post, a Bazooka Joe comic topped with a promo for Roogie's Bump, a 1954 baseball fantasy with ads and posters featuring some killer Brooklyn Dodgers graphics. I have long followed Topp's oddball offerings but not necessarily all of the wonderful Bazooka items issued over the years. Looks like I'll have to bone up on this byway of Topps scholarship.