Ivan Kocmarek

Ivan Kocmarek

Grew up in Hamilton's North End. Comic collector for over 50 yrs. Recent interest in Canadian WECA era comics.

Educational Projects

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…

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GOOOOOOOOAL!!!

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…

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Bert Bushell

Edward Albert Bushell was probably born in 1917 and probably in B.C.  We don’t know much about him except for the comic book work he did for Maple Leaf Publications in Vancouver during the Second World War. His first work…

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WECA Swipes

These days we “swipe” to make a purchase. Holding our credit or debit card, we move its encoded magnetic strip through a slot in a portable reader that decodes the digital information embedded in the strip and makes the appropriate…

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Real Boy’s Stories

An issue of Real Boy’s Stories No. 1 has shown up on the coming ComicLink July Focused Auction. I originally wrote about this title four and a half years ago in one of my earliest columns. At that time, it…

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Heroes of the Home Front

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…

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Chapterhouse Interview

Chapterhouse is Canada’s newest comic book company (established in 2015) with its mainstay Captain Canuck. The company is still a mystery to many comic readers, so I felt it was important to get some correct information about them out. This…

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Sesquicentennial

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…

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More ComicLink WECA Results

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…

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WECA Comics and the War

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…

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