Bazooka Joe Bazooka Joe Bazooka Joe is a comic strip character featured on small comics included inside individually wrapped pieces of Bazooka bubble gum. He wears a black eyepatch, lending him a distinctive appearance. He is one of the more recognizable American advertising characters of the 20th century, due to worldwide distribution, and one of the few identifiable ones associated with a candy. With sales of Bazooka bubble gum down, Bazooka Candy Brands announced in November 2012 that they will no longer include the comic strip in their packaging. The new wrapper will include brain teasers, instructions, and codes that can be
Bazooka Joe the comics included "fortunes" similar to those one would find in a fortune cookie but with a comedic bent. Sometime between 1952 and 1954, Woody Gelman and Ben Solomon, the heads of Product Development at Topps, approached cartoonist Wesley Morse to create "Bazooka Joe and his Gang". The character was named after a contest was held asking for suggestions. Morse was the original artist on "Bazooka Joe", and 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