Ivan Kocmarek

Ivan Kocmarek

Grew up in Hamilton's North End. Comic collector for over 50 yrs. Recent interest in Canadian WECA era comics.

1942

1942, the first full year of Canadian wartime comics, was a year of transition and expansion. Canada had been in the war for more than two years. 1941 had given us the birth of Canadian comics with comics from that…

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Developments

Our virtual two-day symposium on Canadian comics: “80 Years and Beyond” seems to have been a proper success—especially for an inaugural effort. We had over 160 people register, and all the sessions were eclectic, engaging, and informative. The sessions brought…

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Things to Come

We’re just into the last quarter of our 80th Anniversary year of the first Canadian comic book. In the Spring, Sequential Magazine came up with a special oversized issue looking at Canadian comics and in June we pulled off our…

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Gerald Lazare 1927-2021

Occasionally, in your journey through life, you meet some very magical individuals. They may be sitting on top of toadstools smoking hookahs. They may be swamp-dwelling, knee-high, green, pointy-eared Jedi with curious speech patterns. They may even be a soft-spoken…

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Holidays ahead

First of all, best holiday wishes to everybody. Here is a Christmas-themed cover from the December 1935 issue of Montreal’s La Revue Moderne by war-time comics artist Oscar Schlienger done half-a-dozen years before he began working in comics. What a…

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The kelly connection

Today’s column orbits Bell Features artist Fred Kelly whose best-known creation was probably Mr. Monster. It does so because, last month, I came into possession of 21 pages of original Bell Features art and this was due originally to the…

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Masks

Now, more than ever, we have become acutely aware that we all swim in each others’ mists and that proximity can transmit and infect. The western handshake and European cheek peck may soon become obsolete and the palm-press namaste of…

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The Enemy

The sense of ‘pulling together for the greater good’, as we in Canada are doing now under the jackboot occupation of this pandemic, would have had a sympathetic resonance with the Canadians of the Second World War homefront eight decades…

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Sort of Heroes

As many of you know, this column began seven years ago as part of my attempt to focus a newly minted retirement on something both interesting and challenging, albeit perhaps trivial in comparison to the struggles we all face daily…

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Resurrection

Christmas is just a week away and the eye-of-the-storm peacefulness and sentiment of the coming Christmas eve and Christmas day, rather than its stressful bustle and rabid commerce, begin to rope me in. This holiday season, I’ve been wistfully thinking…

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