Posted on Sun, Nov. 27, 2011

Allen Bellman was only 18 when he landed a job other artists would have happily traded their sketchbooks and their pencils to get. He was hired by Timely Comics as an illustrator for Captain America in the heyday of comics publishing.

“I was elated,” the Tamarac resident recalls now. “It was the big time and here I was just a kid. I was so green.”

Now, almost 70 years later, Bellman is back in the Captain America business. He is invited to comic book conventions, and fans from all over the world write him letters of adulation. Even his website was created by a fan. And at 87, after two heart attacks, he continues to draw in a cozy studio, where the memorabilia tells the tale of an amazing career, overlooked for years and now resurrected.

Bellman recently received the Turn Back Time Award from Forest Trace, a luxury resort senior community in Broward. The honor is bestowed on octogenarians who are changing the stereotypes of aging. The glass sculpture sits in a china cabinet in the first-floor condo he shares with his wife of almost 50 years, Roz. When a visitor asks to see it, he jokes with typical good humor, “Octogenarian. What’s that? Never heard of it.”

But plenty of people have heard of Bellman. And if they haven’t heard of him, they’ve seen his work. They covet it. They bid on it. And lately some of those fans have started commissioning his work for “an affordable price,” he says. “Because I’m just happy to get another chance to draw.”

Steven Freivogel set up the website allenbellman.com about six years ago after he met the artist through a freelance story Freivogel’s wife, Joyce, was writing on Jewish notables in South Florida. Freivogel said he and his father had grown up on comics, and Bellman’s style had always struck him as “phenomenal…unique.” He was surprised that Bellman had no Facebook page or website, so he volunteered his services.

“I wanted him to get his name out there again,” Freivogel says, “give him the recognition he deserves. A lot of the guys of his era just aren’t around anymore.”

Bellman has never stopped drawing, never laid down his pen or pencil. It may take him hours or a few minutes to draw a panel — collectors like Captain America beating on Hitler and Red Skull — but he doesn’t mind the effort or the time.

“The little wheels up here still go around,” he says. “I can’t wait to sit down and draw. I get lost in my own world.”

He also knows that fan interest can be fickle and that comic books were once thought to be the bane of young minds. “I’m delighted and gratified. What’s happening to me is great,” he says. “But I don’t ask why. I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Wife Roz says he gets fan mail from as far away as Europe, collectors who can now connect with him and with each other through the Internet. The release of a Captain America movie this summer also helped raise his profile.

“Eighty percent of what’s happening now,” Roz says, “is thanks to the Internet. It’s like they’ve discovered him all over again.”

Lately, old comic heroes have been enjoying a revival, thanks to movie versions. Fans, young and middle aged, love the vintage art, too, and this pleases Bellman to no end. “I thank God every day,” he says. “The letters mean more to me than the money.”

They mean so much because he knows what it’s like to see one’s life’s work almost forgotten.

“He was completely out of the loop when I contacted him [in 1998]”, says Michael Vassallo, a Manhattan dentist who is also a comic book historian and is working on two books about comics. “I remember he was startled that anyone knew him or wanted to speak to him.”

Bellman almost didn’t get the job at Timely Comics that fateful Columbus Day in 1942. His parents, Russian immigrants, owned a bakery in Brooklyn, and Bellman, the youngest of four, doodled on any scrap of paper he could find, including the bakery’s brown bags. He spotted an ad in the New York Times but figured Timely (later known as Marvel) would be closed for the holiday. His father Morris told him to head to the city anyway.

“Best thing that happened to me. If I had gone the next day, somebody else probably would’ve gotten the job and I wouldn’t be here telling you the story today,” he says.

Bellman began doing the background for Syd Shores’ Captain America and eventually worked up to drawing a full script. His boss was the legendary Stan Lee, co-creator of such comic heroes as Spiderman, the Hulk and Iron Man. In addition to Captain America, Bellman also illustrated The Human Torch, Sub Mariner, Jet Dixon of the Space Squadron and other titles.

“It was a job I really enjoyed,” he recalls. “I felt like I was so lucky to have it.”

But by the 1950s, the comic book heroes of World War II had begun to fade away and a book The Seduction of the Innocent portrayed the medium as a bad influence on young, impressionable minds. The author, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, even testified before Congress. By then, Timely/Marvel had retrenched financially. Bellman, like the company’s other full-time artists, had become a freelancer working from home. It was a precarious financial existence.

His personal life was not going well either. He was in the middle of a divorce that left him, he says, “in a not very good place.” To make matters worse, copies of his work — original comic books, scripts and panels — were stolen from his car in New York.

Bellman drifted away from the business in the mid to late 1950s. He met and married Roz, then switched careers to run a wholesale auto parts business. “We had to eat, so I had to work at something,” he says. “But art was still in my heart.”

In 1978, fed up with the cold, the Bellmans moved to Plantation. He worked in the marketing art department of the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel until he retired about 20 years ago but he never forgot his first job. He and Roz visited comic book stores to inquire about back titles. At that time, few recognized him or the titles, and he resigned himself to never seeing his work again. He took up photography and won several awards for his work.

When, over a series of phone calls, Vassallo introduced Bellman to the world of comic book enthusiasts, a world he knew little about, “it was like everything opened up for him,” Vassallo says. So he made black and white and color copies of Bellman’s work from his private collection and shipped them south. He interviewed him for online sites about comics as well.

“Word got around,” Vassallo says. “People started finding him and now he’s got a huge following.”

In 2007, he received the Inkpot Award, bestowed annually since 1974 by Comic-Con International to professionals in comic book, comic strip, animation, science fiction and related pop-culture fields. Last summer, the Bellmans were invited to attend the premiere of “Captain America: The First Avenger.” They dolled up for the occasion and posed for photographs they happily show visitors.

The recognition has been a long time coming, but Bellman still maintains an aw-shucks attitude. “Imagine,” he says, with a chuckle, “me walking the red, white and blue carpet. I still can’t believe it.”