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.
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