Robin Hood

For me those comics that so many people affectionately call the “Canadian Whites” fall into a specific window whose most convenient frame is a single run of comics: Robin Hood Comics Vol. 1 No. 1 (March, 1941) to Robin Hood Comics Vol. 3 No. 34 (Dec. 1946-Jan. 1947). This is what II'vecome to term the WECA era because it was initiated by the War Exchange Conservation Act (WECA) passed Dec. 6, 1940 and came to an end as the provisions of this Act were repealed.
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Getting to Know Gotham

The tv screen is getting crowded with comic-related tv shows this season. Agents of Shield, Arrow, and the Walking Dead are already well-established shows, and The Flash just debuted this month on the CW network. I’m going to look at…

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Humble Bundle

Comic book fans love giving to charity. I have not seen a single convention in recent years were there wasn’t some component that allowed fans to donate money to a good cause. However, if you add some sweet swag to…

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Three Firsts

In this post I want to discuss three WECA firsts starting with a curiosity I take to be one of the first “horror type” stories in comics. “Grim Tales” was a brief two-story run in Wow Comics No. 12 (Jan.-Feb. 1943) and No. 13 (March-April 1943) by Don McKague (my dates for Bell books are all extrapolated estimates, since they stopped listing them in the indicia after the first early issues of their titles). For me, these two stories foreshadow the first true horror comics of the late forties and the horror boom that started with E. C. comics in 1950.
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Jim Aldridge

On one of my research visits to Gerry Lazare and his wife Setsuko, Gerry said that he had recently received a phone call from someone who had written him a fan letter 40 years ago. Gerry said that the man’s…

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An Artist’s Edition Index For All Publishers

Being a fan of the artist's edition line from IDW and all the other publishers that have followed, releasing books in the same format, I've started an index of all current and solicited volumes. Please use it as a reference and let me know what other information you'd like to see listed. I own most of these so it's been fairly easy to collect the information, but as more publishers join in information will have to be gathered from solicitations and online reviews.
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