The Apprentice

Ontario extended our lockdown two extra weeks into mid May, booo!

We’re running a bit behind on that “warehouse books to bigbcomics.com” project but I did put in a ton of work on the weekend and have over 600 books ready to be posted to the site. Monday we’ll be setting up our photo area and taking lots of pics. The key will be to come up with a very efficient way to take pics and upload the books to the site, we literally need thousands of books up on the site so suddenly ergonomics and bulk uploading tricks become topics of discussion. Anybody know of any quick ways to upload thousands of books with correct corresponding pictures, I’m all ears.

This is happening! This is happening!

I had a visit from my good friend Richard Comely recently, he popped by the warehouse and we had a nice time catching up. Richard is a vegan so it was frustrating not being able to entice him with my array of cheeses and salamis, what kind of guy don’t like the salami? Anyway, I have to consider stocking some celery in the crisper.

Richard Comely created Captain Canuck way back in 1975 and I’ve had the pleasure of working with him on many projects over the years including a Captain Canuck/Crime Stoppers comic for Mac’s Milk and the Justin Trudeau cover for the Summer Special back in 2016. I produced the Classic backup stories for the early issues of the Captain Canuck relaunch back in 2014, I even made some Captain Canuck Action Figures and some t-shirts I sold through Niagara Tourism gift shops. I came up with the idea that Captain Canuck Maple Syrup was a good thing to make!

Richard is a special man, always looking to help, always looking for a way to add and never to take away. He’s signed at the Big B booth at Fan Expo for years, even when the show gave him an Artist Alley table, Richard would sneak over and sign at ours. One year the Con people came over and complained, they told Richard to go back to his booth which he did for a bit, then came back. It’s a joy to watch him work the crowd, people adore him.

Knowing Richard as I do it didn’t surprise me one bit when he pulled out this lovely letter I’ve attached below. Richard had met Todd McFarlane in Western Canada in the early 1980s and the young Todd sought Richard’s advice on drawing and inking. All Richard knows how to do is help and this letter shows Todd writing back to Richard asking him to have a look at some of the inking recently done. Richard had given the young artist some pointers and was asking what Richard thought of his latest efforts. Politely Todd asks to see Richard again when he gets back into town to show some more work.

Below the letter are two 1983 drawings of the two characters McFarlane is most famous for, Spider-Man and Spawn.

Walter Durajlija
Walter Durajlija

Walter Durajlija is an Overstreet Advisor and Shuster Award winner. He owns Big B Comics in Hamilton Ontario.

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6 Comments

  1. That is a nice anecdote. The early McFarlane drawings do have a certain charm.

  2. Without knowing the exact upload setup you currently use, it’s difficult to offer advice so I’ll give you a very basic option.

    Open your online image folder, select upload, it will prompt you for a file location, select your home computer image folder, right click select all and go.

    Hope this helps.

  3. Mediafire? The admin who uploads my golden age scans – ie Freelance March/April 1944 – on the Digital Comics Museum website has an account and has me send my pages to him via Mediafire, in a named single file or I could do a whole bunch of single pages (as I did the first time – 56 pages) then he converts them for cbz and uploads to the DCM. Seems really quick.

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