Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
Discussing the minutiae of comic book collecting.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
One aspect of the WECA comics (1941-46) that truly made them Canadian was the great effort they went to in order to engage their readers. One of these central ways was the almost monthly implementation of contests right from the…
Lucky Comics Vol. 2 #7, Maple Leaf Publishing, (Dec 1943/Jan 1944) Today being Christmas Day I thought I’d feature a very special Santa Claus cover. Honestly we should all be giddy just seeing the cover to this book, there are…