Cy Bell Textual Box 1: Contest back covers

If you want to research, first hand, the Bell Features holdings of the Library and Archives of Canada (LAC) up in Ottawa, you have to go into an imposing solid block of a building located just west of Parliament Hill and the Supreme Court on Wellington Street. It’s covered in square, porthole-like windows that would imply a more sinister purpose such as the gathering of government intelligence rather than being our national repository for Canadian culture and history.

You must make LAC aware of your intention to visit at least a couple of weeks in advance and indicate specifically which materials you want pulled from their off-site storage facilities by consulting their online database and filling out the proper online forms. It certainly isn’t a place you can walk in off the street and browse around in like a local library.

My first visit was during a cold late April week 2014 when I still hadn’t decided on the form of the book on old Canadian comics that I wanted to put together. An id badge/card on a lanyard that was waiting for me at the front desk and with that around my neck, I went up to the third-floor viewing room area. There, in that brightly lit room with windows far larger than the portholes that dotted most of the surface of the building and under the secure but polite scrutiny of the librarians/research assistants, I waited a few minutes until a squeaky library trolley was pushed out from a side room. On it were two tiers of large, pizza box-like containers, perhaps a dozen boxes in all, each filled with original Bell Features comic book art pages (50 or 60 pages in each box). I spent two-and-a-half days going through all 2000 pages plus in the collection and photographing the ones that were of interest to me. (It wasn’t until my second visit, two years later, that I looked through a similar trolley but this time filled with eight short boxes containing LAC’s collection of original Bell Features comic books.)

It was on the afternoon of the second day that I left that large reading room for a smaller viewing area on the same floor where a single, small, brown file box was waiting for me behind the reception desk. This one didn’t need a trolley and I carried it through pods of other researchers and students lost in their laptops and their own brown boxes.

My box contained the Cy Bell textual material originally deposited, along with the comics and original art, by Michael Hirsh and Patrick Loubert in 1971. It comprises original letters from and to Cy, telegrams, contracts made with his creators (some signed and some not), certificates of copyright, trademark documentation, and other sundry textual materials—enough that I could mine for a half-dozen columns, really.

However, the thing that dominates the collection when you first open the container up is a large, green, ledger-sized book.

In this over-sized “scrapbook,” Cy had pasted in the cut-off the back covers of almost one-hundred reprint era (1947-52) Bell Features comic books. Each of these back covers had on them a puzzle-type contest invitation for readers to tackle. These contests were a carry-over from those original Canadian comics that Cy put out during the war years. Those comics were crammed with various contest pages, club pages, and pen pal lists that connected kids from across the country and even some from abroad. With these contest back covers on the reprint books, I think Cy felt that direct connection to readership was important and wanted to continue it, even though the contents of the comics from 1947-53 were mainly American.

The first page in Cy’s scrapbook was the back cover featuring Contest No. 6 and underneath the pasted-in page were the winning (first, second, and third place)  cut-out coupons sent to the company. This time the winners were 15 year-old named Grant Plyley from Ontario, 8 year-old Heather Mills from New Brunswick, and 11  year-old Bruce McCulloch from Saskatchewan.

Cy must have assigned the management of these contests to somebody else in his office, perhaps his wife Gladys who served as Secretary-Treasurer for the company because the handwriting accompanying the paste-ups is clearly not his. In any event, the handwriting notes that the prizes have been bought and what they are. A catcher’s mitt for Grant, a doll’s stroller for Heather, and a fastball for Bruce. So it looks like the contest winners were picked and then, what the manager of the contest thought were gender-appropriate prizes, were bought.

The handwriting also indicates that this particular contest (No. 6) appeared on the back cover of Bell’s reprint of Feature Comics No. 135. It’s highly likely that the Canadian reprints of the American issues came out a month to two months after the original copy. The American copy of 135 itself has an indicia date of June 1949 and probably appeared on the stands in August which would mean that the Canadian edition probably appeared on Canadian stands a couple of months after that, or around October 1949. So this being the sixth context available, Cy must have started these contests somewhere in the late summer or early fall of 1949. However, it doesn’t look like the appearance of these back cover contests was done in sequential or consecutive months, since Bell’s Feature Comics No. 137, just two issues later, has contest No. 77 on its back cover.

The last pasted-up page in the scrapbook contains a back cover featuring contest No. 100 and it’s important to note that this contest page contains the statement that “All prizes go to Canadian boys and girls and no prizes leave the country.” This time there is no indication what prizes were bought and won but the winners of this contest were 11-year-old Yvonne Burridge from Huntsville, Ontario, 13-year-old Donald Hall from Montréal, and 7-year-old Dorothy Kerr from Trail, BC. The page also tells us that this contest, which was the last in the scrapbook but not the highest number that came out (the contests run at least to No. 112) appeared on the back cover of the Canadian edition of Hollywood Diary No. 1.

Now, I bring attention to this Cy Bell scrapbook of back covers, not just for its historical and research interest, but also for the fact that it points to what could be a very interesting collecting strain—a complete run of all the Bell Canadian reprint issues that featured these contests on their back covers. It would be approximately a 112-issue run and probably a very difficult one, indeed, to complete.

Here is a chart of what I know so far, gleaning material from Cy’s scrapbook and my own collection:

An addendum or subset to this would be those Bell reprint comics that have winners announcements on their back covers. Here are the few that I know about:

You’ll quickly notice that there is a bit of overlapping and some comics feature the same winners announcements. Here is the winners announcement from the back cover of Active Comics 96. I wonder how many of these kids are still around today?

All in all, I’m on the lookout for any Bell reprint books that have numbered contests on their back covers but I don’t think I’ll come close to getting a complete set.

NEWS

I now have five episodes of my audio podcast now called Cataclysmic Comics Backpack because there was already another podcast from the UK called Comics for the Apocalypse. It’s a sort of Desert Island Discs for comics and my guests are personalities from Canadian comics culture. Episodes up are for our own Walter Durajlija, Kitchener’s Mel Taylor, Dave Darrigo, Ron Hobbs, and Ron Kasman. Coming soon are episodes featuring Rob Walton and Mark Shainblum. Take a short listen when it’s convenient here.