By Ken Stone and Chris Stone
Times of San Diego
SAN DIEGO — Allen Bellman worked for the late, great Stan Lee in the Golden Age of comic books — the 1940s and 1950s. He helped draw Captain America.
Bellman created a strip of his own — “Let’s Play Detective.” He worked for Marvel Comics (and its predecessor Timely Comics) for 20 years. He drew for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and took award-winning photos — including one that took second in a worldwide contest.
But Saturday at the 7th annual San Diego Comic Fest, when asked what he was most proud of, he replied: “What I’m doing now, for the people.”
After an hour talk at the Comic-Con-the-way-it-used-to-be event, Bellman explained.
“I make them smile. I make them laugh,” he said in a Four Points by Sheraton exhibit hall. “When you come to one of my lectures, you will laugh. The Wall Street Journal gave me an article on my humor. And what else can I say?”
At “94 and half,” Bellman is still telling stories through sketches — and conversations.
About how he got his first job at age 18: Answering an ad in The New York Times on Columbus Day.
“They wanted a background artist for Captain America,” he recalls. “I said to my dad: ‘I’ll go tomorrow’ (after the holiday). He says: ‘You go today.’ And I went there and what can I tell you? I went to 34th Street and McGraw-Hill and I got the job right away.”
About first seeing Stan Lee: “I was working there about two weeks and saw this young little man walking behind his uncle, Robbie Solomon. … I said: ‘Who’s that guy?’ ‘Oh, that’s Stan. That’s Stan Lee. He used to be office boy here.’ And they were breaking him in.”
About his assignments: “I worked on anything Stan Lee threw at me — romance stories, Western stories, war stories. I hated to do horses. Their feet were hard to do. I used to put [in] a lot of dust. They called that ‘faking.’”
About sketching: It “puts me in another world. I sit down and draw, and all the world’s ills and kids problems just disappear.”
About his work ethic: “I never feel I did well enough for everybody, but I can always do better and better. And I’m glad I got that feeling.”
About a San Diego Comic-Con moment: “I’m on stage and everyone’s cheering me. I look around for Stan Lee, and I can’t find him. They’re cheering me!”
(At that appearance, he held up his middle finger to show a Captain America shield drawn on a fingernail by his wife’s manicurist. “And the young people [said]: Oh, he’s giving them the finger.’ … I’m not that kind of person.”)
But Bellman also told about grief — losing his son Gary last July at age 69 but later sensing a visit from him.
“I’m sitting in my studio one night, and my wife is in the bedroom, and I talk to Gary all the time, and I felt something touch my shoulder,” he says. “It could have been my imagination. But I felt someone touch my shoulder. I just wanted to know if he was in a good place. I said: ‘God, forgive him for his sins. He knows not what he did.’ What can I say?”
A photographer chatting with Bellman invited him to return to signing his drawings (one for $20, two for $35 — but autographs for free).
“You’ve got to take care of your customers,” the photographer says.
“They’re not customers,” he reacts. “They’re friends. I need a blue pen.”
This is his life now. Drawing (sometimes on commission) and attending comic conventions — including 15 scheduled this year alone. He calls it “giving back.”
“I’m trying to bring this world together,” he says. “I’ve never seen so much hate in my life. I’m from the East Coast. I know where angels fear to tread.”
As a child, Bellman says, he loved to draw: “It’s something in you. I always wanted to tell a story in pictures.”
But he never knew about comic books until later.
“I remember Dick Tracy when it started” in the 1930s, he says of the newspaper strip. “I go all the way back (to) Steve the Tramp Jr. It motivated me to want to draw.”
Now he looks back in wonder. What if he hadn’t listened to his father?
“What would I be doing today? … I never thought I’d reach 94. What can I say?”
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Preceding reprinted from Times of San Diego under auspices of the San Diego Online News Association (SDONA). Bellman is a member of the Jewish community.