Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Avrom Yanovsky was born in Krivoy Rog, in the southern Ukraine in 1911 and two years later his family emigrated to Winnipeg. His parents were political activists and were involved in the Winnipeg general strike of 1919. During the twenties…
Sid Arnold Barron was born in Toronto on June 13, 1917 and from his obituary written by Tom Hawthorn for the Globe and Mail in 2006 (he died on April 29 in Victoria) we learn that he was an…
Mel Crawford was born in Toronto in 1925. His parents divorced when he was four and he went with his mother and her parents to Drumheller, Alberta for a few years and then they all moved onto Oklahoma to live…
I’d like to take a small respite from this small blog for a few weeks to work on a couple of other things. I plan to post the short columns I did for Leif Peng and his Daily Inspiration blog…
I was talking with Walter Durajlija the other day about doing an entry on the WECA keys and he suggested a good task might be to start to create a list of the top twenty WECA (1941-46) books much…
One aspect of the WECA comics (1941-46) that truly made them Canadian was the great effort they went to in order to engage their readers. One of these central ways was the almost monthly implementation of contests right from the…
In the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about what the world of WECA comics (Canadian Whites) really needs and, besides the searchable index/data base and a price guide, what I think that this area really needs is a…
On Saturday, August 25, among many other winners, three Canadian comics creators will be inducted into the Hall of Fame category: Katherine Collins (Arn Saba) from more recent decades and Vernon Miller and Murray Karn from earliest days of Canadian…
Just wanted to do a quick report on the Canadian Comics panel that we held at Niagara Con this past Saturday (June 8). The panel was comprised of Hope Nicholson (producer for the upcoming “Lost Heroes” documentary which will air…
By the end of 1942 all 7 main Bell Features titles were in place. These included Action Comics, Commando Comics, Dime Comics, The Funny Comics, Joke Comics, Triumph Comics, and Wow Comics. All but a handful had no date of…
Yesterday marked 1 year and 6 months since my Undervalued Spotlight #103 post. In that post I put the spotlight on Maple Leaf Publishing’s Better Comics #1 and talked about the importance and the scarcity of the book. I remember…
The quality of the artwork in the Canadian WECA books has often received unwarranted malignment for its primitive, almost amateur quality. Though it’s true that this was sometimes the case for the fledgling comic book industry of the early forties,…
Interest in Canadian war-time comics, popularly known as the “Canadian Whites” is growing and with a scarce and limited supply of them available, their values continue to escalate. The other day I picked up one of my WECA books and…
The Funny Comics was the penultimate main title to come out of Commercial Signs/Bell Features in the early forties. First came Wow Comics in Sept. of 1941, then Dime Comics and Active Comics in Feb. of 1942, followed by Joke…
Ted(d) Steele With April Fool’s day just passing by, I want to bring attention to perhaps the quirkiest comic creator from the WECA period, Tedd Steele. Theodore Arthur Steele was born on April Fool’s Day, 1922 and his creative juices…
No, this is not going to be a piece about good girl art in the WECA books, nor about the small handful of female heroes (Nelvana, The Wing, Polka-Dot Pirate, Betty Burd etc.) that graced the pages of those…
Robin Hood Comics Vol. 3 #34, Anglo American, (Dec 46/Jan 47) The second Canadian Whites (or WECA period) meeting was held by the “Team Canada” group, or is it the “Eh Team”? Actually we have no formal name yet…
A few weeks back, in my “Team Canada” post, I made the point that WECA era books did not produce a super hero team like the JSA at National. This week I want to make note of the fact that…
Imagine that time in Canada during the early forties with the spectre of war looming over the homefront. No internet, no computers, no reality shows (except for war newsreels) or TV to speak of and everything in film-noir black-and-white. The…
There’s that significant moment in silver screen history when Judy Garland, as Dorothy, steps out of her black-and-white Kansas world, through the door of her tornado-transported farm house, into the rich, full-colour, munchkin-filled Land of OZ. This really didn’t happen…