Shazammed!

The early days of Bazooka and its comics were a mish-mash of suppliers, artists and licensed strips. However, I recently ran across an interesting premium issued by the Brock Company of Chattanooga that ties in a bit with the early Bazooka comics. Intrepid readers of this blog know that Bazooka originated as a candy created by Brock and that sometime between 1937 and 1947 Topps acquired the trademark, most likely after the end of the war, and applied it to their new bubble gum.

Close readers also know that Bazooka first used a comic strip called Bubbles when it launched in 1947 (Bazooka was manufactured by a Topps nom-de plume called Bubbles Inc.) . The strip was not especially well done nor was it all that funny:

Bubbles quickly gave way to some strips licensed from Fawcett Publications:

The 1947 copyright for Fawcett Publications puts it within the first year of Bazooka, which was a five cent product as Topps Gum filled the one cent niche at the time (Topps originally marketed separate products for each price point after the war, although this practice ended by 1949). I suspect Bubbles was only inserted in the initial wave of Bazooka issued in New York City that commenced April 23rd but I'm not 100% sure of that.  The Fawcett strips possibly came a couple months later when they started national distribution on July 21st; the above is what I believe is the third version of the Bazooka wrapper, which would feature small changes almost annually if not more frequently, but it may date from early 1948 while holding the 1947 Doc Sorebones.  Those comics were separate inserts and not printed on the backs of the wrappers by the way.

A year later though, at least one Fawcett character was featured on a premium issued by.....Brock Candy!

If you look at the 18 available subjects, they were not all Fawcett characters but rather from a variety of publishers dominated by Marvel/Timely. :

Some of the other booklets in the series have copyrights from 1949 and 1950 so the offer either occurred over a few years or began a couple years after 1948. In addition multiple firms utilized these mini comics to advertise but some others I've seen do not have the ordering details like Brock did or were entirely blank backed.

It's meaningless in the grand scheme of things but I like how a company connected to the history of Topps issued something also connected to Topps, albeit by the slimmest of threads.

Bubble's Trubbles

BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd sent along a couple of neat scans the other day.  While it's meant for my upcoming guide to the early history and cards of Topps, since that is still a good three months off, I felt a preview of sorts might be fun.

When Bazooka was launched in mid 1947, it was sold only in a five cent roll.  You can get a good look at this roll in a Topps advertising photo of the era:

There are some things worth noting here.  Topps always (and I mean always) gave perceived additional value for money in the early days.  Sometimes it was a mere "6 for 5" deal like we see here (that roll of gum could just as easily only been scored into five pieces) and other times, when the cards started to come out, it was extra play value.  If you look closely at the bottom line of text, you can see the "Don't Talk Chum Chew Topps Gum" line made famous in World War 2 advertisements.

The comic shown is called Bubbles. This was possibly the first strip to be included with Bazooka, although some Fawcett Comics reprints may have been first. You can also see that the right edge of the comic is cut off.  This seems very strange for an ad piece to show this and Shep advises he bought a few different Bubbles comics and they were all badly miscut.

The comics were not printed on the back of the wrappers in the early days; the technology was not quite at that point in 1947-48.  The outer wrapper would have looked like this:

Shep pieced together a couple of Bubbles miscuts to produce an "intact" scan.  Intriguingly, it's the same strip shown in the ad above:

Topps would go through over a dozen different strips before finally hitting comic gold with Bazooka Joe in 1954. Still, the gag in the above strip looks like it could have easily been from a Bazooka Joe strip. There's also a Milprint advertisement along the right side; I want to look into this a little more as Milprint was a Topps vendor that pioneered a lot of their foil packaging and this comic is definitely not made of the shiny stuff.