Woody Gelman
Encyclopedia
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
s in quality hardcovers and trade paperbacks. As an editor and art director for two-and-a-half decades at Topps Chewing Gum
Topps
The Topps Company, Inc., manufactures chewing gum, candy and collectibles. Based in New York, New York, Topps is best known as a leading producer of baseball cards, football cards, basketball cards, hockey cards and other sports and non-sports themed trading cards.-Company history:Topps itself was...
, he introduced many innovations in trading cards and humor products.
Gelman was the co-creator of Popsicle Pete and the co-creator of Bazooka Joe
Bazooka Joe
Bazooka Joe is a comic strip character, featured on small comics included inside individually-wrapped pieces of Bazooka bubblegum. He wears a black eyepatch, lending him a distinctive appearance...
for Topps. He was also a co-creator of Mars Attacks
Mars Attacks
Mars Attacks is a science fiction trading card series released in 1962. The cards feature artwork by science-fiction artist Wallace Wood and tell the story of the invasion of Earth by cruel, hideous Martians. The cards depicted futuristic battle scenes and bizarre methods of Martian attack, torture...
, adapted into the 1996 movie by Tim Burton
Tim Burton
Timothy William "Tim" Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet...
.
Born in Brooklyn, Gelman attended City College of New York, Cooper Union and Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
before signing on as an assistant animator, in-betweener and scripter with Max Fleischer
Max Fleischer
Max Fleischer was an American animator. He was a pioneer in the development of the animated cartoon and served as the head of Fleischer Studios...
's studio in 1939, continuing to write for Famous Studios in 1946.
Comic books and advertising
Gelman was the creator and writer of The Dodo and the Frog series for DC ComicsDC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...
. His comic book work from 1944 to 1954 included Nutsy Squirrel and other funny animal comic books of the 1940s, notably Funny Stuff and Comic Cavalcade
Comic Cavalcade
Comic Cavalcade was a comic book series published by All-American Publications and later DC Comics. It ran 63 issues, cover-dated Winter 1942/43 to Summer 1954....
. He also wrote and drew the crime story, "The Kid from Brooklyn!", for Heroic Comics #32 (September 1945).
In 1945, Gelman teamed with Ben Solomon to form a New York advertising art service, Solomon & Gelman, to create advertising campaigns involving cartoon characters, such as their Popsicle Pete magazine and ads for the Popsicle company. Topps writer-editor Len Brown
Len Brown (comics)
Len Brown is a writer, editor, radio personality and comic book scripter, best known as the co-creator of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and Mars Attacks....
recalled how the partnership led to Solomon and Gelman to sign on full time with Topps:
- Woody had a partner in his art business named Ben Solomon who was also out of animation. They both left Paramount about the same time and came back to New York and started the art service, which was called Solomon & Gelman. In fact, they published the boys series books, called Triple Nickel books. They sold for 15¢. Solomon became the art director at Topps, and Woody was the creative director... Actually, he left Paramount after he got involved with trying to unionize the animators and the studio got wind of it and fired whoever was involved. Paramount was down in Florida in those days, so he had moved down there. He came back to New York in 1944 or 1945 and opened a studio, doing art advertising. Popsicles used to feature a kind of Bazooka Joe character in their advertising, Popsicle Pete, and he was in a lot of their ads that were aimed at kids. I think Woody came up with the character. Later he got involved with Bazooka Joe. Through his art service, Woody was approached by various corporations for advertising work. Topps ultimately came to him, and the owner at that time was impressed with Woody and offered him a job. Woody closed down his art studio which he'd operated for seven or eight years... He did a lot of different stuff. Those were just the two that I remember, Bazooka Joe and Popsicle Pete, because they were cartoon characters, but the studio produced a lot of stuff, basic product artwork for advertisements.
Topps
In the autumn of 1951, Gelman and Sy BergerSy Berger
Sy Berger was an employee of the Topps company for over 50 years. He is credited as being the co-designer of the 1952 Topps baseball series.-Topps:Berger's first day at Topps was also the first day that Topps began to produce Bazooka Gum...
, then a 28-year-old World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
veteran, designed the 1952 Topps
Topps
The Topps Company, Inc., manufactures chewing gum, candy and collectibles. Based in New York, New York, Topps is best known as a leading producer of baseball cards, football cards, basketball cards, hockey cards and other sports and non-sports themed trading cards.-Company history:Topps itself was...
baseball card
Baseball card
A baseball card is a type of trading card relating to baseball, usually printed on some type of paper stock or card stock. A card will usually feature one or more baseball players or other baseball-related sports figures...
set on the kitchen table of Berger's apartment on Alabama Avenue in Brooklyn.
From 1953 to the late 1970s, Gelman headed Topps's Product Development Department, working with a staff that included associate creative director Len Brown, gagwriter Stan Hart
Stan Hart
Stan Hart is an comedy writer with many television credits. His work also appeared for decades in Mad Magazine. He was closely associated with another MAD writer, Larry Siegel; though the two wrote separately for the magazine, both contributed to the off-Broadway musical The Mad Show, and later to...
, visual concept creator Larry Reilly, writer-cartoonists Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book memoir, Maus. His works are published with his name in lowercase: art spiegelman.-Biography:Spiegelman was born in Stockholm, Sweden, to Polish Jews...
and Bhob Stewart
Bhob Stewart
Bhob Stewart is an American writer, editor, artist and film maker who has written for a variety of publications over a span of five decades. His articles and reviews have appeared in TV Guide, Publishers Weekly and other publications, along with online contributions to Allmovie, the Collecting...
, and designer-cartoonist Rick Varesi. Gelman assigned work to numerous freelance cartoonists, including Jack Davis
Jack Davis (cartoonist)
Jack Davis is an American cartoonist and illustrator, known for his advertising art, magazine covers, film posters, record album art and numerous comic book stories...
, Mort Drucker, Jay Lynch
Jay Lynch
Jay Lynch is an American cartoonist who played a key role in the underground comix movement with his Bijou Funnies and other titles. His work is sometimes signed Jayzey Lynch. He has contributed to Mad, and in 2008, he expanded into the children's book field.-Early life and career:Born in Orange,...
, Bob Powell
Bob Powell
Bob Powell né Stanislav Robert Pawlowski was an American comic book artist known for his work during the 1930-40s Golden Age of comic books, including on the features "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle" and "Mr. Mystic". He received a belated credit in 1999 for co-writing the debut of the popular...
, John Severin
John Severin
John Powers Severin is an American comic book artist noted for his distinctive work with EC Comics, primarily on the war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat; for Marvel Comics, primarily on its war and Western comics; and for the satiric magazine Cracked...
, Tom Sutton
Tom Sutton
Tom Sutton was an American comic book artist who sometimes used the pseudonyms Sean Todd and Dementia...
, Basil Wolverton
Basil Wolverton
Basil Wolverton was an American cartoonist, illustrator, comic book writer-artist and professed "Producer of Preposterous Pictures of Peculiar People who Prowl this Perplexing Planet", whose many publishers included Marvel Comics and Mad.His unique, humorously grotesque drawings have elicited a...
and Wally Wood
Wally Wood
Wallace Allan Wood was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, best known for his work in EC Comics and Mad. He was one of Mads founding cartoonists in 1952. Although much of his early professional artwork is signed Wallace Wood, he became known as Wally Wood, a name he...
. Beginning in 1967, Gelman supervised Wacky Packages
Wacky Packages
Wacky Packages are a series of trading cards and stickers featuring parodies of North American consumer products. The cards were produced by the Topps Company beginning in 1967, usually in a sticker format. The original series sold for two years, and the concept proved popular enough that it has...
, one of the biggest fads of the 1970s, and he was responsible for devising many other Topps cards, stickers, posters and humor products over decades.
Triple Nickel Books
Power Boys
The Power Boys are two fictional brothers in a series of 6 children's novels by Mel Lyle, published in the mid 1960s by Whitman Publishing.-The characters:...
series from the mid-1960s.)
Nostalgia Press
After doing a facsimile reprint of the 1945 Little Nemo in Slumberland softcover, with an August DerlethAugust Derleth
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first publisher of the writings of H. P...
introduction, Gelman began Nostalgia Press in the early 1960s. One of the earliest Nostalgia Press books was The Picture History of Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
(1965), designed by Gelman and showcasing a large collection of rare Chaplin memorabilia. In 1960, he was an associate editor of The American Card Catalog
The American Card Catalog
The American Card Catalog is a reference book for American trade cards produced before 1951, compiled by Jefferson Burdick.It has become the de facto method in identifying and organizing trade cards produced in the Americas pre-1951. The book catalogues sports and non-sports cards, but is best...
.
The first Nostalgia Press hardcover was Flash Gordon (1967), a reprint of Alex Raymond
Alex Raymond
Alexander Gillespie "Alex" Raymond was an American cartoonist, best known for creating Flash Gordon for King Features in 1934...
comic strips, and this book had a follow-up utilizing Flash Gordon proof sheets supplied to Gelman by the artist Al Williamson
Al Williamson
Alfonso "Al" Williamson was an American cartoonist, comic book artist and illustrator specializing in adventure, Western and science-fiction/fantasy...
. Two years later, he compiled art by Charles Dana Gibson
Charles Dana Gibson
Charles Dana Gibson was an American graphic artist, best known for his creation of the Gibson Girl, an iconic representation of the beautiful and independent American woman at the turn of the 20th century....
for The Best of Charles Dana Gibson (Bounty Books, 1969), with accompanying biographical material and an introduction by Gelman. Bill Gaines
William Gaines
William Maxwell Gaines , better known as Bill Gaines, was an American publisher and co-editor of EC Comics. Following a shift in EC's direction in 1950, Gaines presided over what became an artistically influential and historically important line of mature-audience comics...
and Bhob Stewart
Bhob Stewart
Bhob Stewart is an American writer, editor, artist and film maker who has written for a variety of publications over a span of five decades. His articles and reviews have appeared in TV Guide, Publishers Weekly and other publications, along with online contributions to Allmovie, the Collecting...
selected 23 stories for the full-color EC Horror Comics Library of the 1950s; with introductions by Stewart and Larry Stark
Larry Stark
Larry Stark is an American journalist and reviewer best known for his in-depth coverage of the Boston theater scene at his website, Theater Mirror. In newspapers and online, Stark has written hundreds of reviews of local productions and Broadway tryouts from 1962 to the present...
, this oversize (10" x 14") hardcover was published by Nostalgia Press in 1971.
In 1973, Gelman published a collection of Little Nemo strips, first published in Italy. Gelman discovered original strips at a cartoon studio where McCay's son worked in 1966. Many of the original drawings that Gelman recovered were displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
under the direction of curator A. Hyatt Mayor
A. Hyatt Mayor
A. Hyatt Mayor was an American art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a leading figure in the study of prints, both old master prints and popular prints....
.
In the 1970s, Gelman did two collections of Scorchy Smith
Scorchy Smith
Scorchy Smith was an American adventure comic strip created by artist John Terry that ran from 1930 to 1961.Scorchy Smith was a pilot-for-hire whose initial adventures took him across America, fighting criminals and aiding damsels in distress...
, and he moved into yet another area, publishing a magazine, Nostalgia, mainly devoted to reprints of comic strips. The first issue of his earlier magazine, Nostalgia Illustrated, was completed in 1967 as a dummy but was never published. Instead, Gelman sold the title and some material to Magazine Management, which did at least a dozen nationally distributed issues in the early 1970s. During the 1970s, he also published his Golden Age of the Comics series, reprinting such strips as Mandrake the Magician
Mandrake the Magician
Mandrake the Magician is a syndicated newspaper comic strip, created by Lee Falk , which began June 11, 1934. Phil Davis soon took over as the strip's illustrator, while Falk continued to script. The strip was distributed by King Features Syndicate.Davis worked on the strip until his death in 1964,...
, Terry and the Pirates
Terry and the Pirates (comic strip)
Terry and the Pirates was an action-adventure comic strip created by cartoonist Milton Caniff. Captain Joseph Patterson, editor for the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, had admired Caniff’s work on the children's adventure strip Dickie Dare and hired him to create the new adventure strip,...
and Thimble Theatre
Popeye
Popeye the Sailor is a cartoon fictional character created by Elzie Crisler Segar, who has appeared in comic strips and animated cartoons in the cinema as well as on television. He first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip Thimble Theatre on January 17, 1929...
.
Other work by Gelman appears in Wacky Packages, published by Abrams in 2008.
Films
Robert AltmanRobert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
's live-action film Popeye
Popeye (film)
Popeye is a 1980 live-action film adaptation directed by Robert Altman and adapted from E. C. Segar's Thimble Theatre aka Popeye comic strip.Marketed with the tagline, "The sailor man with the spinach can!", the film is a musical...
(1980) is adapted from E. C. Segar
E. C. Segar
Elzie Crisler Segar was an American cartoonist, best known as the creator of Popeye, a character who first appeared in 1929 in his comic strip Thimble Theatre. Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest it was "SEE-gar". He commonly signed his work simply Segar or E...
's Thimble Theatre comic strip. The screenplay by Jules Feiffer
Jules Feiffer
Jules Ralph Feiffer is an American syndicated cartoonist, most notable for his long-run comic strip titled Feiffer. He has created more than 35 books, plays and screenplays...
was based directly on Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye the Sailor, a hardcover reprint collection of 1936-37 Segar strips published in 1971 by Nostalgia Press.
Tim Burton's film Mars Attacks (1996) was adapted from Topps 1962 Mars Attacks
Mars Attacks
Mars Attacks is a science fiction trading card series released in 1962. The cards feature artwork by science-fiction artist Wallace Wood and tell the story of the invasion of Earth by cruel, hideous Martians. The cards depicted futuristic battle scenes and bizarre methods of Martian attack, torture...
trading card series written by Gelman and Len Brown and illustrated by Wally Wood, Bob Powell and Norman Saunders
Norman Saunders
Norman Blaine Saunders was a prolific commercial artist who produced paintings for pulp magazines, paperbacks, men's adventure magazines, comic books and trading cards...
.
Awards
In 1971, he was honored by the Academy of Comic Book Arts with Recognition for Preservation and Popularization of Comic Art.Gelman, who lived in Malverne, Long Island
Malverne, New York
Malverne is a village in the town of Hempstead in Nassau County, New York, United States. The population was 8,514 at the 2010 census.-Geography:According to the United States Census Bureau, the village has a total area of , all of it land.-History:...
, maintained a collection of rare American and European periodicals dating back to the 19th century. He died February 9, 1978 of a stroke at Franklin General Hospital, Valley Stream, Long Island.