EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 30 © 2020 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

83 The Topps Company, Inc. out of New York (founded in 1938), pro‐ duced mainly chewing-gum, sweets and collectables. Their most pop‐ ular early product was the ‘Bazooka bubble gum’ that came wrapped within a mini-comic strip named ‘Bazooka Joe and his Gang’. The comic strip was ineptly drawn, but children loved them and kept the wrapper (which was meant to go into the rubbish bin) collecting the adventures of the comic characters. Beginning in the 1950s, Topps de‐ cided to include trading cards based on the Western character ‘Hopa‐ long Cassidy’, popularised in a series of films (and later a TV series) by silver-haired actor William Boyd. These were quite successful due to the popularity of the ‘Hoppy’ character, but were soon surpassed when the company put out another series of trading cards, this time featuring baseball players. These sets of cards were designed by Sy Berger (1923-2014), a 28-year-old veteran from the Second World War, and Woody Gelman (1915-1978), a publisher, cartoonist, novel‐ ist and both a comic book and animation writer–artist. The cards in‐ ABOVE: Suicide Charge , gouache on board, 1962. Civil War News trading card set (Topps, 1962), card No. 60: “Dateline Fort Pillow, TN — April 12, 1864: ‘Rebels Beat North at Fort Pillow’.” These cards were done at a 5 by 3.5 inch format, and are reproduced here at a slightly larger format, so you can actually see all the detail of the brushwork from the original painting. All images © by The Topps Company Inc. and original art courtesy of Heritage Auctions