Nos Heros Canadiens
I had a very positive time at this year’s Montreal Comicon giving a couple of presentations. On Saturday I offered “Canadian Super Heroes of WW II” which had a very engaged audience of about 80 people who wanted to find…
Comic Book Daily
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Comic Book Daily
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Category Whites Tsunami, WECA Splashes
A look at Canadian Whites.
Read MoreNos Heros Canadiens
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…
World War II Canadian Comic Covers
Comic book collectors have, in a stark mercenary fashion, transformed the old adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover” into “You can value a comic book by its cover”. This assertion doesn’t carry with it any aesthetic or…
Second Canadiana Auction
This past Wednesday saw the ending of a ten-day auction of Canadian comics related material on the internationalcollectiblesexchange ebay web page. This time there were over 200 items listed, more than twice that of last year’s inaugural Canadiana auction and,…
Steel City Supermen
As a kid who grew up in the North End of Hamilton in the 60s, the transformation of Hamilton from the ambitious Steel City to a flourishing Arts City that has accelerated since the turn of the century has been…
Trailblazers Done and RAID Gallery Show On
Just a quick note to announce that I just picked up the 300-copy print run of my comic book tribute to Canadian wartime comic book artists called Trailblazers. This floppy comic has turned out to be a 56-pager containing 26…
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…
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…
Trailblazers, Galleries, and a Symposium
We’ve just gone over the hump of a year that’s so far been slowly improving. I hope that the light will continue to grow as we head into Labour Day, Thanksgiving, and the Christmas holidays. I remind you again that…
First Annual Canadian comics auction on I.C.E.
I’m very excited about our upcoming auction of Canadian comics and related material. As far as I know, this is the first auction solely focusing on Canadian comics ever, and it is meant to be part of the events commemorating…
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…
The Doris Slater-Titus Exhibit
This past Saturday, March 6th, was the birthday of Doris Slater, Canada’s first female comic book artist. She was born in 1917 on a farm near Chatham, Ontario. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and began her comic…
Anglo-American diversifies
Well, here we are, 80 years since the publication of Better Comics No. 1 in March 1941. At that time, the Luftwaffe was peppering London with bombs, Rommel was pushing us around in North Africa, Jews were being transported to…
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…
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…
Cy Bell textual box pt. ii: contracts, trademarks, and copyright
Last column, we began a look into the small textual material box belonging to Cy Bell in the Bell Features fonds at the Library and Archives of Canada in Ottawa. We began that look with a hundred-page or so ledger-type…
Cy Bell Textual Box 1: Contest back covers
If you want to research, first hand, the Bell Features holdings of the Library and Archives of Canada (LAC) up in Ottawa, you have to go into an imposing solid block of a building located just west of Parliament Hill…
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…
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…
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…