Bazooka Joe

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For the British punk rock band, see Bazooka Joe (band).

Bazooka Joe comic, in Hebrew

Bazooka Joe is a comic strip character, featured on small comics included inside individually wrapped pieces of Bazooka bubble gum. He wears an eyepatch, 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 dollars). From the very beginning in 1954, the bottom of the comics included "fortunes", similar to those one would find in a fortune cookie, but usually with a comic bent. The Canadian version of the Bazooka Joe comics featured bilingual (English and French simultaneously) text bubbles. 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 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 so-called "Tijuana Bibles", or "eight-pagers", which are considered a precursor to the underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s.