How many of us bought Bazooka chewing gum when we were kids because it tasted good?

My guess is no one. As a candy, only the cardboard sticks that come with baseball cards and clove-flavored Necco wafers have less appeal. Yet, Bazooka was popular. Why? The comic that came with it.

The beer world is discovering the joy of comics, too. On Saturday, East End Brewing in my favorite city of Pittsburgh, Pa., is releasing the second incarnation of its “Illustration Ale,” done in partnership with the ToonSeum. The beer is a 700-bottle limited edition Belgian dark strong ale that features label art designed by six local Pittsburgh artists.

The partnership might seem like an odd pairing. But given the increasing importance that beer brewers are placing on labels to help them stand apart from the competition, something distinctive like original comic art can do that, said John Mattie of the ToonSeum.

“I think for most people the label makes or breaks the beer,” he told me in an email interview. “That may be unfair, but the reality is that with so many beers crowding the market, you want a label that is distinct, memorable, and enticing. It doesn’t have to be the “Mona Lisa” of beer labels, but individuality and design means a lot to folks who, not knowing anything about the beer inside, are willing to bite on.”

Enter comics, that most accessible of art forms which, just like craft beer, continues to gain respect in the higher end of the market.

A friend of mine, Emily Sauter, was the first person I’d met to connect comics and beer. She writes the Pints & Panels blog, where she reviews beers in comic form. For her, the blog was a marriage of two of her passions. But the popular response suggests that her twin loves are shared by many other people.

“Beer and comics are SUPER geeky with a lot of beer people loving comics and vice/versa,” she told me. “Being a ‘brewtoonist’ certainly raises eyebrows at the fests. There’s no one doing what I’m doing and with hundreds of beer bloggers out there, the fact that mine is drawn makes it semi-special, I guess, and it gets me noticed.”

The joint-project on Illustration Ale began, similarly, by people seeking to bring together two loves. Mattie has long had feet in both worlds as the ToonSeum’s manager and a familiar face in the craft beer circuit, where he would do some pours, promotions and bottling for East End. Also, the artist Wayno , a ToonSeum board member, occasionally did label art for East End.

What resulted is something like a museum piece, itself.

“Wayno is essentially curating this like an exhibit,” East End brewmaster Scott Smith said in a phone interview last week.

For East End, the project wasn’t so much of a marketing tool as it was a way to support local artists and the ToonSeum, Smith said. Aside from a few specialty bottles, East End is a draft-only brewery, so it’s not like it really needed to separate itself from other brews on store shelves.

However, there is some cross-pollination.

“It definitely expands us into a different audience,” Smith said. “But these days in craft beer, that’s not even hard to come by.”

The real driving force behind this project is to support the artists. Comics have a long history of use in marketing of all kinds of products, beer among them. But try and name the artists who drew them.

People might recognize Ralph Steadman’s work with Flying Dog which, while perhaps not strictly “comic” art, certainly evokes the genre. But he was something of a household name before his work appeared on beer bottles.

Mattie and Smith would like to bring some name recognition to other artists themselves. Appearing on beer bottles, however unconventional of an art object that might be, figures to do just that.

“The project is a bit Warholian in the idea that, while cartoon characters and cartoon labels have always been used to sell beer and millions of other products in the U.S. and around the world, most people really don’t consider the artists who designed those campaigns and labels,” Mattie said. “We’re hoping to change that a bit.”

Here’s video of a tasting at my house with some students at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vt. Emily Sauter is among the guests.

Follow me on Twitter @brewsreporter