Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
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…
Monday was Remembrance Day here in Canada. Last year on Remembrance Day we lost Jack Tremblay who, as a fifteen-year-old, created two war strips for Bell Features; one about a fictional air ace called “Crash Carson,” and the other about…
The story of the past derives from documents and memory. These documents can be artifacts and phenomena such as the petrified thigh bone of a brontosaurus or the distinct geological layer of iridium that corresponds to the impact of a…
I remember Gerry Lazare telling me that it took Fred Kelly over a year of having his art repeatedly critiqued and rejected by Bell Features’ Art Director Adrian Dingle before Dingle allowed one of Kelly’s stories to be published. Well,…
One-shots are outliers in this wonderful hobby of ours and there are many reasons for their existence. Some are compendiums that gather together a number of features around a given character or theme. Some are ash-cans that are most often…
What became Bell Features Publications Limited of Canada started in the summer of 1941 with the first issue of a title called Wow Comics, cover-dated September 1941. This was an ambitious project that turned out to be Canada’s first full-colour…
Collectors and comic aficionados are quick to knock Canadian war-time black-and-white comics to the lower rungs of the comic book quality ladder and, of the four main Canadian comic book publishers, Anglo-American comic books are seen to occupy the lowest…
Few can deny that comics and graphic storytelling have become an influential force in 21st-century western culture. Academic departments and programmes that concentrate on its study are growing. It fills the small screen and the big screen and is the…
Having put Heroes of the Home Front and the first edition of the WECA Comic Book Price Guide to bed last summer and having the fall and winter to relax from the scramble of getting these two projects together and…
What would a Canadian newsstand have looked like in terms of comic books during the summer of 1941? Well, there would have been a dearth of them to begin with because the war-time government ban on the importation of almost…
The Top Ten WECA Covers A recent movement that has risen to the surface in comic book collecting seems to be a focus on impactful covers—especially impactful golden age covers. This focus can, of course, overlap with other collecting strains…
The early post-war period was one of turmoil for publishers of Canadian comics. Montreal’s Educational Projects didn’t even make it into 1946. The last issue of Canadian Heroes carried the cover date of October 1945. The reasons why Educational Projects…
By now, a lot more of us know that there were two eras to the Canadian Golden Age of comics. In the U.S., the measure of the Golden Age extends from Action 1 in 1938 to about Showcase 3 in…
The Comic Link auctions have been, perhaps, the primary source for obtaining Canadian wartime comics (WECA comics) over the last half-dozen years. 2017 offered up a comparative glut of these hard-to-find books with just over 180 of them being made…
Let me put forward an analogy that, I think, sort of explains the nature of the four main Canadian WECA comic book publishers. If you remember, these four are Anglo-American and Bell Features—both based in Toronto, Maple Leaf Publishing based…
I start with the preemptive apology acknowledging that this column will be mainly a shameless (but red-faced) self-promotion. For me this has been the “Summer of the Book.” Finished printed copies of my Heroes of the Home Front book arrived…
The big news this week is that the WECA Price Guide is finally finished and available! I have to thank Tony Andrews, Jim Finlay, and Walter Durajlija for being the main forces behind determining the prices listed in the book…
News I was at my friend Bob MacMillan’s place last week and he showed me two Colossal Comics with Adrian Dingle covers I had not seen before. These do not have war-themed images like the three covers we are familiar…
News Winter’s finally behind us and let’s see where we’re at. I’ve come to the very end of working on the finishing touches of my Heroes of the Home Front book and it’s sitting at about 330 pretty cool pages.…
Many of us ‘oldsters’ got punted into the world of Canadian war time comic books by Patrick Loubert and Michael Hirsh’s 1971 book, The Great Canadian Comic Books. Clive Smith was the British ex-pat behind the design and assembly of…