Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
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 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…
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…
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…
The publisher that seems to get the least amount of love from collectors of war-time Canadian comics is Montréal-based Educational Projects. It was the last of the big publishers to come onto the scene and its comics were qualitatively different…
It was great to meet up with Jack Tremblay and his son Rick Trembles at the Montreal Comic Con this past Saturday. Jack turned 91 this on May 1st and now lives in a retirement home after a fall that…
Publishing a book is a drawn out and often frustrating process even on top of researching and assembling the actual draft text and graphics material. This is especially so when the cards are stacked against it because the book focuses…
By my reckoning (and I hope I haven’t missed any), there were 48 WECA comics on offer in last month’s ComicLINK auction. You can check out results from the October auction here and last year’s summer auction (which will also…
Happy Sesqui-seventeen to everyone and may it turn out the best that it can for all of you. I’ve been trying to think about how our hobby and industry could make some sort of positive and relevant contribution to this…
This largest ever offered collection of WECA comics keeps on rolling out from out of the Land Beyond the Mists (we may never find out the source of this collection because Jon Signorelli tells me that the owner wants to…
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…
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…
During the WECA period, Educational Projects in Montreal seemed to be putting out the poor cousins of those Toronto and Vancouver comics which were populated with fictional and fantastic crime and Nazi fighters of all shapes and sizes. Canadian Heroes…
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),…
Comics as art “Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent.” ― Dr. Seuss Doing this column, with its necessary research and the knowledge gained from that research, has, by default,…
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…
1946 was the twilight year of denouement for Canadian war time comic books. With their slick American counterparts back in the swimming pool, they had lost some of the lustre that the protection of the Canadian government had afforded them.…
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…