Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
We’ve just gone over the hump of a year that’s so far been slowly improving. I hope that the light will continue to grow as we head into Labour Day, Thanksgiving, and the Christmas holidays. I remind you again that…
Well, here we are, 80 years since the publication of Better Comics No. 1 in March 1941. At that time, the Luftwaffe was peppering London with bombs, Rommel was pushing us around in North Africa, Jews were being transported to…
First of all, best holiday wishes to everybody. Here is a Christmas-themed cover from the December 1935 issue of Montreal’s La Revue Moderne by war-time comics artist Oscar Schlienger done half-a-dozen years before he began working in comics. What a…
Now, more than ever, we have become acutely aware that we all swim in each others’ mists and that proximity can transmit and infect. The western handshake and European cheek peck may soon become obsolete and the palm-press namaste of…
Christmas is just a week away and the eye-of-the-storm peacefulness and sentiment of the coming Christmas eve and Christmas day, rather than its stressful bustle and rabid commerce, begin to rope me in. This holiday season, I’ve been wistfully thinking…
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…
Collectors and comic aficionados are quick to knock Canadian war-time black-and-white comics to the lower rungs of the comic book quality ladder and, of the four main Canadian comic book publishers, Anglo-American comic books are seen to occupy the lowest…
Having put Heroes of the Home Front and the first edition of the WECA Comic Book Price Guide to bed last summer and having the fall and winter to relax from the scramble of getting these two projects together and…
By now, a lot more of us know that there were two eras to the Canadian Golden Age of comics. In the U.S., the measure of the Golden Age extends from Action 1 in 1938 to about Showcase 3 in…
The big news this week is that the WECA Price Guide is finally finished and available! I have to thank Tony Andrews, Jim Finlay, and Walter Durajlija for being the main forces behind determining the prices listed in the book…
News I was at my friend Bob MacMillan’s place last week and he showed me two Colossal Comics with Adrian Dingle covers I had not seen before. These do not have war-themed images like the three covers we are familiar…
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…
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…
Well, the total hasn’t moved much in this second week and it appears that, at this pace, we’ll fall short of our $25,000 goal. This would mean that we’d be back at square one with getting this book printed and…
First bit of news is that the Heroes of the Home Front Kickstarter went live on Labour Day and will run through to October 4th. Let’s see if we can pull this thing off! Take a look when you have…
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…
I often wonder how many WECA (or, if you prefer, Canadian Whites) collectors there are out there? How many of them are outside Canada (in the States, in the UK, in Europe, or even in Australia/New Zealand)? In any case,…
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…
We’ve just come to the end of 3 summer ComicLink auctions (you can check earlier results from a couple of years ago in a two of my old columns: Feb. 2014 and April 2014 ). These summer auctions featured almost a…
Gerald Lazare was born in Toronto on September 25, 1927 to parents who lived in the Junction and operated a millinery. As a four or five year-old , when his older half-brother visited on weekends, he would watch him making…