Monday, March 9, 2020

Allen Bellman (1924-2020)

It is with much sadness that I report the passing today of my dear friend, artist Allen Bellman, the last man alive who drew the exploits of Timely's golden-age Captain America during the Second World War. Allen passed peacefully at the age of 95 after a short illness, with his beloved wife Roz by his side and surrounded by his loving family.



Three years ago, I had the distinct pleasure to edit Allen's autobiography, Timely Confidential, published by Bold Adventure Press.  I wrote a long forward detailing Allen's history and my association and intersection with that history. I think it perfectly sums up the essence of Allen Bellman...........





Validation:  It’s a simple word of four syllables. According to The Oxford English Dictionary (in one of three different entries) it states, “Recognition or affirmation that a person or their feelings or opinions are valid or worthwhile.” Keep that in mind and we’ll come back to this shortly.

I spent the decade of the 1990’s and early 2000’s realizing that hundreds of golden-age comic book artists were aging, passing away (or would soon pass away) without ever telling their stories for posterity. Sure, the big names had been interviewed and were well-known in the community of comic book history and fandom … the giants of the Golden Age, stars of the Atomic Age, and mainstays of the Silver Age, but they were not who I was concerned with.

I’d spent two decades collecting, indexing and documenting the contents to thousands of comic books from Marvel’s oldest history, 1939 to 1959, and I’m one of a small handful of people who knew and could identify much of the work, unsigned, of scores of long-lost, mostly forgotten creators who poured their souls onto the page and left the industry before the Silver-Age renaissance of the late 1950’s. I was looking for the obscure, the unheard from. The results from my searches were often frustrating, from creators who didn’t want to re-hash their pasts (having felt they went on to bigger and better things) to those who suspiciously wanted to know “why” I was interested in them.

In early 1999, I was given Allen Bellman’s phone number by Paul Curtis, the brother of celebrated editor/author/historian Maggie Thompson, who with her late husband Don, were editors of the pre-internet industry bible, The Comics Buyer’s Guide. Paul had been assembling photocopies of unsigned Timely stories into a sort-of fanzine, which he then mailed to known fans and historians, soliciting their help in art-spotting the unsigned late 1940’s Timely bullpen artwork by obscure artists. I believe the idea was to reprint some of these stories with Marvel’s permission, but the project fell through and Marvel later began their own in-house historical reprint series. It was this way, after receiving one of these pamphlets, that during a conversation, Paul asked me, “Did you ever hear of an artist named Allen Bellman?”

Allen Bellman?

Of course I had!

Bellman had drawn “Jet Dixon of the Space Squadron”, following George Tuska (issue #1) and Werner Roth (issues #2, #3, #4)! Everybody knew that! Or at least a handful of people did. Well, “I” did.
His stories were also scattered all over the pre-code horror, crime and western books published by Atlas, Marvel’s 1950’s incarnation. I loved the work! It was stylized, quirky and unique. I also knew he’d been spotted much earlier in the Timely period on one-page crime fillers scattered throughout the 1940’s in super-hero books. He was spotted because he signed these, as he had also mostly signed his work in the 1950’s. And like scores and scores of artists, he vanished from comics by the mid-decade Fredric Wertham/comics code fiasco, never to be seen or heard from again.

So I screamed at Paul (well, it was e-mail), “ALLEN BELLMAN IS ALIVE? YOU’VE SPOKEN TO HIM?”

Now in all fairness, those e-mails are long gone, lost in innumerable computer crashes over the years, so I’m paraphrasing here. I don’t remember what Paul responded, just that he passed along the phone number and I was thrilled. On February 5th, 1999, I made the call to a Florida area code and a male voice picked up. I asked: “Is this Allen Bellman who worked for Timely Comics in the 1940’s and 1950’s?” The answer?  “Yes it is.” I probably said something along the lines of, “I’ve been looking for you for years!” 

Allen was extremely friendly and answered all my initial questions as if the events had happened yesterday, nearly all pertaining to the freelance work of the Atlas period of Marvel’s history, from 1950 to the time Allen disappeared from the newsstands. That was the work I knew and loved. That was the work likely “anyone” knew.

I was also shocked to learn just how early on Allen had started at Timely at age 18, joining the staff in late 1942 after seeing an ad in the New York Times. On his father’s advice, Allen answered the ad (Timely was then in the McGraw Hill Building on West 42nd St.) and was hired on Columbus Day. His very first assignment? Background artist on Captain America, then being penciled in the main book by the great Syd Shores and inked by Vince Alascia.

A condensed version of his career follows … Allen’s first editor would have been Vince Fago, the former Max Fleischer Studio animation artist who had taken over the editor-in-chief role from a young Stan Lee, the latter having entered the service at approximately this same time. That period of apprenticeship led to his very first solo feature, “The Patriot”, a character that vanished by the end of the war, but brought back to prominence today in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  television show.




Throughout the 1940’s, Allen was part of the fabled Timely bullpen, soon situated on the 14th floor of The Empire State Building. From 1943 until 1948, Allen toiled primarily on superhero comics, scattered among titles including Captain America Comics, All-Winners Comics, All-Select Comics and Marvel Mystery Comics. Characters that were delineated by his brush include the aforementioned Patriot, The Destroyer, Captain America, Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch.
























Unfortunately, except for his one-page crime feature, Let’s Play Detective, none of this superhero work is signed. Add to this the fact that Timely’s comics were created in a piecemeal, assembly-line fashion with different pencilers, different inkers, and occasionally diverse hands on different pages within a single story, thus creating the main reason Allen’s work had been forgotten over the decades. His artwork of the 1940’s was hidden, diluted and anonymous.

By the end of 1949, Timely fired the entire bullpen. Allen joined the Lev Gleason staff, turning out crime, romance and western stories for Charlie Biro. Superheroes had been on the downswing since the end of the war and by the dawn of this new decade were all but replaced by a diverse newsstand of genre comics. Within a year he was back freelancing for Stan Lee among the myriad of horror, sci-fi, crime, war, western and romance titles that abounded in the early 1950’s. This work, all penciled and inked (and usually signed) by Allen, is the best work he ever did in comics. It allowed him to be innovative and creative in a way the rushed, assembly-line Timely product never allowed. If you want to see “pure” Allen Bellman, look there.


























By the coming of the Comics Code in late 1954, Allen vanishes from the comic book world.

At the end of what was probably 45 minutes, there was one thing I could palpably sense in that initial phone conversation. Unlike many of my previous, lesser-known Timely creator track-downs, Allen absolutely loved talking about his time at Timely, looking back upon it with great fondness. But Allen then made a request of me, asking whether I possessed any of the work he did.

It turns out that Allen had long ago lost all copies of his work and had not seen it in 50 years. In fact, the vast majority of his family (he is a beloved grandfather many times over) had never seen it. Inexplicably, Allen even related that over the years he had told people of his work for Stan Lee as a comic book artist and people didn’t even believe him, as he didn’t remember what he’d done, nor had copies of the work to show anyone.

Well, he was asking the right person because I practically had “all” of his known work, which meant all the freelance work he did and a smattering of Timely hero work, where I could identify it. All this I copied and prepared into a 500-page binder for Allen and his family.

A friendship developed as I spoke to Allen roughly every few months, even meeting him and his lovely wife Roz in 2000 when they were up for a family function in New Jersey. Allen and Roz took my family out to dinner and Allen showed me his old New Jersey haunts. 




In 2001 I began to interview Allen in earnest for a formal interview which was published in Alter Ego magazine in 2003. The success of the interview brought him to the attention of comic convention promoters in Florida and Allen became a frequent guest, introducing him to the world of fandom. In 2005, I put the interview online (first on a friend’s website, later on my own blog) and Allen went viral! With an audience well beyond the readership of a printed magazine, the world realized that there was another wonderful golden-age creator who fandom had missed for decades.

In 2007, Allen was an invited guest at Comicon International in San Diego and received an Inkpot award. In the next 10 years, Allen and Roz have been guests at practically every single major (and minor) convention in the country. He is beloved wherever he goes, doing sketches, taking photos, signing books and making people very happy. All of this culminated in Allen walking the Red Carpet at the film premier of Captain America: The First Avenger in July of 2011. As Allen has told me, if it weren’t for all these convention appearances and his new fans, he’d probably be in a rocking chair!

Two days ago (as I write these words on Sunday, August 13, 2017), Allen threw out the first pitch at Miami Marlins Stadium before a game between the Miami Marlins and the Colorado Rockies.




The cycle is complete. Validation. The works created by Allen and his colleagues are now well-known and (more than) worthwhile. He was a vital cog in an industry that thought itself nothing more than a means for selling paper, but in retrospect created a billion-dollar industry and became a modern cultural mythology. Allen is part of our Americana. I think that’s pretty damn impressive.

      — Dr. Michael J. Vassallo



Postscript:

In 2018, I once again did a long interview with Allen for publication in the September, 2018 issue of Alter Ego Magazine, 14 years after my first interview published in 2004. Allen talks about more personal matters, opens up about his years at Timely in more detail than ever before, and speaks about his relationship with Stan Lee. That interview is now available HERE.

In May of 2019, Allen and Joe Sinnott were guests at the Empire State Con in Albany, NY. Thanks to an urging from my sister-in-law Marisol, we made the drive upstate and I surprised Allen at his table. You can see Joe Sinnott's table to the left and I had a wonderful time spending an entire afternoon with those two legends. This is the video from that surprise.....







Additionally, this June 17, 2020, will see the publication of Atlas At War, a hardcover anthology I edited of Marvel's greatest war comics from the Atlas period of their history. Published by Dead Reckoning, an imprint of the Naval Institute Press in conjunction with Marvel Comics, it contains an Allen Bellman pre-code war story. Two months ago, I interviewed Allen and his colleague Joe Sinnott about their memories of working on War comics. The interviews can be read HERE.


Finally, I want to offer my deepest condolences to the family of Allen Bellman. Allen was a special man, someone who only wanted to give back. He has left an impact on untold thousands of fans and admirers who love him. His legacy was not just artistic, but of humanity. I spoke to him 13 days ago and he was unafraid of dying, knowing his run was a long one, and a good one. To Roslyn and his daughter, Kathy, Judith, Alice, Ellen, granddaughters Doreen and Jeaneen, Mandy, Laura, Shawn and Rachael, as well as all extended family and close friends, take comfort in knowing it was a life fully lived. 

Allen, I will miss you and am proud to have been your friend and able to re-introduce you to the world. I bid you a heartfelt goodnight.







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