Len Brown – RIP
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Former Topps trading card Creative Director Len Brown has passed away.
Leonard Albert (Len) Brown
October 7, 1941 – August 11, 2026
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Len embarked on a remarkable professional journey shortly after high school when he joined the Product Development Department of Topps Chewing Gum. Over a four-decade tenure, he ascended to become the company’s Creative Director.
During his time at Topps, Len co-created the acclaimed T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents comic book series, for which he won two Alley Awards (Best Giant Comic, Best New Strip or Book) in 1965, and produced legendary trading card lines, including baseball, Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, Desert Storm, Civil War News, and Mars Attacks.
While involved in a great number of Topps trading card products in the early 1960s the newly-hired Brown is perhaps most famous for bringing the idea for Mars Attacks to Topps art director Woody Gelman.
I remember cutting out- I can’t believe I actually did this- a Wally Wood Weird Science cover where these three boys are hiding behind a rock watching flying saucers land with aliens coming out of them. I cropped this cover to bubble gum card size and showed it to Woody Gelman who ran the department. I said, “Wouldn’t stuff like this sell on cards?” He thought I was onto something, that kids would like well-drawn science fiction bubble gum cards. He was every bit as instrumental in Mars Attacks as I was. We’d sit and talk about each scene.
Among comics fans he is well-regarded for teaming with Wally Wood and co-creating Tower Comics T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents comic book series in 1965.
A life-long comics fan Brown did manage to get a few comic book credits and tangential comic strip links.
In 1967 Topps issued a set of 16 baseball trading card-sized eight page comic books satirizing current comic book and comic strip characters. Roy Thomas recalling the series said that Brown had come up with the idea and had written the covers to the mini-comics before hiring Thomas to write the six page interiors.
Around 1967 … my friend Len Brown–then a young exec at Topps Chewing Gum–asked me to write a bunch of the “Krazy Little Comics” series of little 8-page comics that would parody Marvel, DC, and comic strip heroes.
Len had already named all the parody characters and written all the covers, working first with Wally Wood, then with Gil Kane (who’d be inked by Wood). I was hired to write the others.
In the early 1960s Brown, with Gelman, attempted an ambitious comic strip project that didn’t work out. Robbie, the full page Sunday comic strip drawn by Al Williamson, never made it past two samples.
Woody and I had talked about seeing if a fantasy Sunday page could be sold (with a tip of the hat to Nemo of course). We bucked the trend at the time, because full page Sunday strips were gone with the exception of an occasional paper that still ran Prince Valiant full size. In the early 1960s that was rare.
We commissioned Al to draw two Sunday pages as a sample for the syndicates…
Brown continued with Topps until the end of the 20th Century. In 2000 he relocated to Texas and indulged in another passion, classic country music. From Richard Whittaker at The Austin Chronicle:
Two seemingly separate communities – horror fans and country music enthusiasts – are unified in their mourning with the passing of an Austinite who played a major role in both fields.
For regular listeners to KOOP, Len Brown was the longtime voice and host of Country Roots, his Brooklyn accent little indicator of his extensive knowledge of country & western music. He’d actually broken into the radio business on several stations in New Jersey, but when he retired to Austin in 2000 he quickly became a mainstay of the city’s community-owned and operated station. His contribution was recognized in 2022, when he was one of the first people to be inducted as a KOOP Honorary Member…
KOOP Radio notes Brown’s passing on their Facebook page.
Also on Facebook is Greg L. Goldstein’s eulogy for his Topps co-worker and friend.
Len Brown has caught the last train out.
And no, he wasn’t eaten by angry, time-hopping dinosaurs, as depicted in one of those wonderfully deranged Topps Dinosaurs Attack! cards (’88) — Len clutching a stack of classic back-issue comics, Mark Newgarden down front, and Art Spiegelman actually being eaten.
He died of considerably more conventional causes on August 11 at age 84.
Len was one of those guys whose career ran somewhat parallel to the comic-book business, but whose influence on it — and on generations of kids who loved comics, cards, monsters, movies and assorted pop-culture nonsense — was enormous. At Topps, where he eventually became creative director, he helped shape an astonishing range of non-sports cards and pop-culture projects for more than four decades.
He joined Topps in 1959, basically right out of high school, and stayed for 41 years. Forty-one years.
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