Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Comic book collectors have, in a stark mercenary fashion, transformed the old adage “You can’t judge a book by its cover” into “You can value a comic book by its cover”. This assertion doesn’t carry with it any aesthetic or…
Just a quick note to announce that I just picked up the 300-copy print run of my comic book tribute to Canadian wartime comic book artists called Trailblazers. This floppy comic has turned out to be a 56-pager containing 26…
Last column, we began a look into the small textual material box belonging to Cy Bell in the Bell Features fonds at the Library and Archives of Canada in Ottawa. We began that look with a hundred-page or so ledger-type…
One-shots are outliers in this wonderful hobby of ours and there are many reasons for their existence. Some are compendiums that gather together a number of features around a given character or theme. Some are ash-cans that are most often…
As a socio-cultural anthropologist, the issue of representation has been part of my academic trajectory since I was an undergraduate. How issues such as gender and race are depicted in popular culture (and by whom) are topics that have been…
What would a Canadian newsstand have looked like in terms of comic books during the summer of 1941? Well, there would have been a dearth of them to begin with because the war-time government ban on the importation of almost…
The Top Ten WECA Covers A recent movement that has risen to the surface in comic book collecting seems to be a focus on impactful covers—especially impactful golden age covers. This focus can, of course, overlap with other collecting strains…
It’s hard to contradict the axiom that comic book collecting these days is character driven. In this piece, I’d like to focus on a few WECA period artists who maybe should be more collectible just for the quality of their…
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…
Because it's Canada Day week I want to do a bit of a more involved special column about the figurehead of the Canadian Whites this time--Nelvana. This mini-skirted, semi-mortal, maid of the Arctic skies has firmly become the totem (the chosen emblem) of the Canadian war-time comics.
As a lot of you may know, I am working on putting together a coffee table-sized book that would feature the main artists of these WECA comics, that is, the Canadian Whites. I've got about 10 sections finished and I have submitted a package with the first three sections to Dundurn Publishing in Toronto. I really don’t hold much hope for seeing my cache of fairly arcane information being picked up by a publisher over the next few months, but I will try a couple more (such as Drawn and Quarterly and Fantagraphics). Most likely, my project will only be able to see fruition as a self-published e-book or a book for which a good deal of publishing funding could be raised through an online funding scheme such as Kickstarter.
The Wing was the creation of John G. Hilkert and first appeared in Joke Comics No. 4 (Sept./Oct. 1942) as the Wing, but if we look closely we can find an appearance of a character (not costumed or super powerful) named Trixie Rogers in a text story written by Hilkert and art by Murray Karn in Dime Comics 5 called “Death Casts a Vote” a couple of months before she put on the costume in Joke Comics.
Ivan celebrates Nelvana's crowd funding success, then discusses Canadian Whites and Overstreet.
The first happened during the WECA period itself when, in 1945, Bell Features decided to issue 6 compendiums of stories from earlier issues. These took features already published and brought them together in large (68 pg.) books that sold for 15 cents.
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…
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,…
There were four main publishers of Canadian comics in the WECA era. Anglo-American Publications out of Toronto and Vernon Miller’s Leaf Publications out of Vancouver started the whole thing off in March of 1941 with the issue of Robin…