Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
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…
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…
Rachel Richey’s new collection of Johnny Canuck pages from the 28 issues of Bell Feature’s Dime Comics is a welcome addition to the bookshelf of any Canadian comic book collector and the libraries of anybody interested in Canadiana or Canadian…
The reprint package of Brok Windsor stories came out last month: Brok Windsor/Jon Stables (edited by Hope Nicholson), Bedside Press, 2015, and is a welcome addition to your Canadiana bookshelf and to your comic bookshelf in general. Overall, this is a…
This is a two-part post containing first my own, kind of orthodox, view on what constitutes a WECA comic followed by fellow WECA collector Jim Finlay’s view on a finer and more porous line of distinction between the WECA period…
Last week I received, from his wife Ginni, the sad news that Mel Crawford had passed away peacefully on Monday, Feb. 23. He had been in a long-term care facility for about the last year. Mel started out as a…
I miss doing this column and I wish I had enough hands and time to do justice to it and the other work I am doing. I certainly don’t want to give the impression that the column is dead. There’s…
I began doing this column on Jan. 3rd 2013 just after I had finished and sent off the long article I’d written on WECA comics for the Overstreet Price Guide which was finally published this year. I had been out of…
Presents and surprises are one part of Christmas, for some a huge part, but one can’t deny that it’s invariably a pleasant experience to get a gift, especially an unexpected one. My friend and fellow WECA book collector, Walter Durajlija,…
It’s an understatement to point out that most average income collectors, like me, have been priced out of battling for WECA comics through online auctions now that the comic collecting community has more widely become aware of them: of their…
There are very few comic books that are truly scary and cause those fine hairs on the back of my neck to stand to attention but here’s one that’s a Canadian WECA book. In the spring of 1942 a strange…
Text stories, a whole bunch of words and a couple of pictures; they were probably the most skipped-over part of any WECA comic they appeared in. Though they didn’t appear in every war-time Bell Features comic book, they did appear…
When we think of Canadian war-time comic publishing companies, we usually think of the “Big Four”: Maple Leaf Publications, Anglo-American Publications, Bell Features, and Educational Projects with Adrian Dingle’s Hillborough Studio run of Triumph-Adventure Comics appended to Cy Bell’s books.…
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…
John Bell is probably best known to you for his published work on Canadian comics. He was kind enough to take the time to answer a number of questions I sent him with a view to publishing his responses…