Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
WE DID IT!?! As of this writing we’re at $25,501, $500 above our Kickstarter goal. But I can’t say that I didn’t have my moments of doubt and maybe even resignation. Now we can move forward without doubling back and…
Entering the last week of the Kickstarter for my Heroes of the Home Front book where we stand just below $18,000 but are aiming for $25,000, I find myself waxing nostalgic back to the fall of 2012 when I was…
Well, the total hasn’t moved much in this second week and it appears that, at this pace, we’ll fall short of our $25,000 goal. This would mean that we’d be back at square one with getting this book printed and…
Just over a week into the Heroes of the Home Front Kickstarter funding campaign and we are 40% funded at just over $10,000 with 77 funders. Extrapolating this, it looks like we will need about 200 funders pledging at the…
Ready to kick off the Kickstarter for my Book on the Bell Features artists called Heroes of the Home Front on or about Labour Day and was fortunate enough to get a write up by Jeff Mahoney in the local…
I often wonder how many WECA (or, if you prefer, Canadian Whites) collectors there are out there? How many of them are outside Canada (in the States, in the UK, in Europe, or even in Australia/New Zealand)? In any case,…
It’s hard to contradict the axiom that comic book collecting these days is character driven. In this piece, I’d like to focus on a few WECA period artists who maybe should be more collectible just for the quality of their…
We’ve just come to the end of 3 summer ComicLink auctions (you can check earlier results from a couple of years ago in a two of my old columns: Feb. 2014 and April 2014 ). These summer auctions featured almost a…
While interviewing Nancy Lee, the niece of Doris Slater, a couple of years ago, a family anecdote she shared with me has stuck in my mind. Doris’ older sister, Minnie, was married to Ted McCall, a long time editor at…
You may think that the above picture is some sort of study from Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” but it’s actually the panel from my presentation at Toronto Con this past weekend. From left to right it’s Gerhard, James Waley, Fadi…
Just like my last post, I am still mulling over ways to acknowledge and publicize 2016 as the 75th anniversary of the Canadian comic book (Better Comics V. 1 N. 1). I hope that my book on Bell Features artists (which should…
Here we are just a couple of days before Christmas and just over a week from the start of 2016 which will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the very first Canadian comic book proper, Better Comics Vol. 1 No. 1 (March, 1941),…
Patrick Loubert, who was born in Toronto in 1947 and Michael Hirsh, who was born in Belgium in 1948 but moved to Toronto when he was three and then to New York City for most of his teen years, were…
Gerald Lazare was born in Toronto on September 25, 1927 to parents who lived in the Junction and operated a millinery. As a four or five year-old , when his older half-brother visited on weekends, he would watch him making…