Tag WECA

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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Rucker Publications

Here’s one of those strange companies that started to appear towards the end of the WECA period. Its main title was The Weekender. For the first two issues it was known as The Comic Section of Illustrated Weekender News Reviews. The implication of the title was that it was some sort of newspaper or magazine insert but actually the so-called “news section” was included in the comic book itself. This news section was a dozen or so black and white pages of text and photos dealing with popular news items of the day.
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Masked Marvels

One great result of having a forum to make posts about WECA comics is that the readers can make corrections and cleanups of what I’ve written as well as offer new information that can fill in essential blanks, see my post from two weeks ago for example. Here are a couple more “blanks” for you all.
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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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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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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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Avrom Yanovsky

Avrom Yanovsky was born in Krivoy Rog, in the southern Ukraine in 1911 and two years later his family emigrated to Winnipeg. His parents were political activists and were involved in the Winnipeg general strike of 1919. During the twenties…

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Sid Barron

  Sid Arnold Barron was born in Toronto on June 13,  1917 and from his obituary written by Tom Hawthorn for the Globe and Mail in 2006 (he died on April 29 in Victoria)  we learn that he was an…

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Mel Crawford

Mel Crawford was born in Toronto in 1925. His parents divorced when he was four and he went with his mother and her parents to Drumheller, Alberta for a few years and then they all moved onto Oklahoma to live…

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Winner! Gagnon!

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…

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The Big Book

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…

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