Tag canadian whites

Whites Mystery Artist

In doing my ongoing research into Canadian war time comics, I recently came across this Toronto Star article about a Whites artist named Michael (Bud) Riled who seems to have created a female jungle heroine called "Terena of the Jungle." It even has a quote from Peter Berkemoe, owner of The Beguiling about the period of The Whites.
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Maple Leaf Checklist

Of all the WECA books, those produced by Maple Leaf Publishing out on the west coast of Canada are in the most demand and are the hardest to find. In this post I want to initiate the question of the number and dates of all the Maple Leaf issues… especially that murky last year—1946.
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WECA Toons 2

My last post was on the “toony” side of Vancouver’s Maple Leaf Publications and in it I stated that there were no real toons in Montreal’s Educational Projects Publishers. I now want to qualify that since I’ve been able to find three fillers that might qualify.
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WECA Toons 1

Comic book art runs the rainbow spectrum from realistic, to semi-realistic, to surrealistic, each time the metaphor getting stronger. In the surrealistic “toons” the world is populated by caricature humanoids and/or anthropomorphic fauna (‘funny animals”). Each of the four WECA publishers, except Educational Projects, had features that fell somewhere on the surrealistic end of this continuum.
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A Whites Christmas

Think back, even imagine, a time before our internet brains, before even our TV brains... when things inside our heads were much quieter and much clearer. Think back to the time of the Canadian Whites when tension came not from a barrage of digital and video bits streamed into our cortex but from a sustained home front war effort. Imagination didn’t have its dots connected with computer generated imagery. Here’s a war era imagination machine.
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Lazare: The Orphan Strips

Some of the most interesting Lazare creations are the orphan “left-overs,” those stories that were one-shot “try-outs” or “fillers” and there were eight of these. The first three were in consecutive issues of Triumph Comics Nos. 20-22 which is a Bell title for which Lazare never did a feature character.
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Century Publications

In the twilight of the WECA period during the spring of 1946 a new comic publisher in Toronto, Century Publications, began putting out a handful of comics with most of the copies targeting a British audience. The address of Century Publications was 2382 Dundas Street West, now a used car lot in the Junction about half-a-block away from the Dundas West Subway Station on Bloor Street.
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Lou’s Goose

I attended an auction in Vineland this past weekend and it prompted me to write another short piece on one of the WECA artists. I went to the auction because, among other things, they were offering seven Toronto-themed coasters from the early thirties.
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My Back Pages

On occasion these B-sides became hits in themselves and sometimes even outshone their original A-sides in popularity. In the same vein, I think that there are a few WECA book back covers that merit attention and offer lots of historical information to mine and I wanted to share some of them with you.
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Stamp of Approval

If a comic book concept with a fairly slender thread connecting it to Canada (Joe Shuster the illustrator behind the creation of the character was born in Canada) can merit this ceremony, why can't a 75th anniversary of the birth of our own genuine and rock solidly Canadian comic books merit at least an equal value. I know we had that issue in 1995 that contained stamps of Johnny Canuck and Nelvana but this is different.
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Home Ice

Let me then try to point to a few times in the WECA books that specifically locate the action on Canadian soil or at least, in some way, make it clear that the story is taking place in Canada or, finally, directly connect the story to Canada.
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Casting Call

The brief seventies awakening to and appreciation of the Canadian war-time comic industry began with Michael Hirsh and Patrick Loubert’s November, 1971 publication of the compendium of Bell Features material they called The Great Canadian Comic Books (Peter Martin).
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