The Canadian Alternative: Cartoonists, Comics, and Graphic Novels

INTRODUCTION

Comics in Canada

According to John Bell, one of the few authors to have written much about comics in Canada, "[u]ntil 1971, the year which saw the publication of Michael Hirsch and Patrick Loubert’s ground-breaking study of Bell Features’s 1940s comics, The Great Canadian Comic Books, it had never occurred to me, or most other Canadian fans of my generation, I’m sure, that comic books could be Canadian" (Canuck Comics 13).

Hirsch and Loubert’s book was the first history of Canadian comic books—albeit with a very limited focus—and remains one of the few works to survey the Canadian manifestation of the medium, primarily by reprinting, for the first time in decades, representative samples of the Canadian whites, published by a few Canadian companies in the 1940s. The whites, so named because, in contrast to comics published in the United States, they usually printed their stories in black and white, as opposed to color, were the first Canada-based comics published in the aftermath of the Canadian Parliament’s passage of the 1940 War Exchange Conservation Act, which, because it imposed restrictions on imports, effectively ended the distribution of US comics in Canada until after the Second World War.

Ivan Kocmarek’s WECA Comics: Canada’s Golden First Age of Comics offers an account of the emergence of Canadian publishers to capitalize on this gap in the marketplace, sometimes merely creating Canadian versions of US properties (e.g., Anglo-American Publications’s version of Captain Marvel) but more frequently using homegrown talent to create domestic and often distinctively Canadian characters. Several recent reprint projects are bringing back some of the best known of the Canadian whites. Volumes reprinting the adventures of Nelvana of the Northern Lights (published by CGA comics in 2014 and subsequently reprinted by IDW), Johnny Canuck, and Brok Windsor (both published by Bedside Press in 2015) have recently appeared, even the names of whom suggest their Canadian or at least northern origins,¹ and a volume of the original Doc Stearne/Mister Monster comics is forthcoming. Doc Stearne was revived by Michael T. Gilbert, first for Pacific Comics’s Vanguard Illustrated issue 7 in 1984, and then in various incarnations for Eclipse, Dark Horse, and other publishers throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, and sporadically since, but Gilbert’s version significantly modifies the original: the original Doc Stearne, as well as the other Canadian whites titles and characters, have been largely unseen by anyone other than dedicated collectors for decades. Indeed, one might see Gilbert’s appropriation of this lost Canadian figure as paradigmatic of the general elision of Canadianness in comics.

This elision is evident even in how comics have been represented broadly in Canada. For instance, in 2013, Canada Post (the Canadian equivalent of the United States Postal Service) issued a seventy-fifth anniversary commemorative stamp set celebrating the creation of Superman, trumpeting the US’s most recognized superhero as the Canadian-American-Kryptonian superhero, arguing that Superman distinctively represented the Canadian outsider’s point of view and the values of diversity, justice and tolerance (Superman, 75th Anniversary). The grounds given for claiming Superman as Canadian include his immigrant status, akin to that of many Canadians, especially in the mid-twentieth century; set designer Kosta Tsetsekas is quoted as saying comic books were how I learned to speak English as a nine-year-old immigrant to Canada. Superman, then, can be seen as of a piece with Canada’s claims to multicultural status, if one squints a bit: Superman as immigrant (legal or otherwise) in any complex or sophisticated way is barely an overt subject in Superman comics for their first several decades of existence. That Superman’s co-creator, Joe Shuster, was Canadian, is also provided as grounds, as is the putative debt the early depictions of Clark Kent’s newspaper offices owe to Canada. He originally worked at the Daily Star before its name was changed to the Daily Planet: Shuster worked at the Toronto Star offices when he was a boy. Canada Post did issue an earlier stamp series celebrating Canadian comics characters, the 1995 set including Nelvana of the Northern Lights, Johnny Canuck, Captain Canuck, Fleur de Lys, and, of course, Superman, again included as Canadian. However, no single-character commemorative series akin to the Superman seventy-fifth anniversary series has been issued for Canadian-created comics characters such as Nelvana, whose seventy-fifth anniversary took place in 2016, or others. The Canada Post website cites Superman’s strong fan base as grounds for high expectations for the set; unlike the Canadian superheroes who have appeared on stamps, Superman has been a constant (multi)media presence for decades, so presumably fan expectations would translate to sales expectations. Then again, if images of Canadian-made comics are unavailable to Canadians, and the existence of the characters unknown, there is no commercial incentive to commemorate them.

Superman was also featured in a Heritage Minute commercial, part of a series produced to celebrate significant moments in Canadian history. The Superman Heritage Minute represents Canadian-born Joe Shuster coming up with almost every original characteristic of Superman (Cleveland-born Jerry Siegel is not even referenced in the commercial, though he is in the Canada Post piece on the Superman stamp series) and identifies Superman in its final caption as A Part of Our Heritage (Heritage Minutes: Superman). Again, no such proud moment of national heritage has been produced to celebrate the creation of any Canadian-published comics character, including those designed explicitly as Canadian superheroes (such as, for example, Captain Canuck, who first appeared in 1975 and who has been revived several times, including a current incarnation from Chapterhouse Comics). Apparently, Canadians are happier to share in (and even appropriate, especially in the case of the Heritage Minute ad) US comics’s accomplishments than to acknowledge their own.

Yet cartooning has a long history in Canada, even predating the establishment of the country itself. Canada was granted status as a dominion, with its own governance, by means of the British North America Act of 1867, but in Invaders from the North (2006), John Bell argues that "Canadian cartooning started in earnest with the publication in 1849 at Montreal, Quebec, of John Henry Walker’s weekly Punch in Canada" (21–22), and William C. Werthman concurs in his Canada in Cartoon (1967), while Charles and Cynthia Hou trace the depiction of Canada in cartoon back to a cartoon in Punch in Canada’s inspiration, Punch, in 1820 (Hou and Hou 1). Peter Desbarats and Terry Mosher, in The Hecklers: A History of Canadian Political Cartooning and a Cartoonist’s History of Canada (1979), however, carry the history back to the eve of the battle of the Plains of Abraham, in 1759, a crucial turning point in the struggle between England and France for control of what was to become Canada and the event that ultimately led, therefore, over a century later, to the establishment of Canada as a nation.

Third in command under the English General James Wolfe at the battle of the Plains of Abraham was George Townshend, not only a soldier but also an artist and caricaturist. In addition to producing a portrait of Wolfe, Townshend also apparently drew several cartoons satirizing his commanding officer. On the eve of battle, Wolfe saw one of these cartoons and is reported to have said, If we live […] this will be inquired into (Desbarats and Mosher 22; for other accounts of the incident, see Warner 131 and Brumwell 226). Wolfe did not survive, so Townshend’s scurrilous cartoons were not inquired into, instead fading into historical obscurity. Nevertheless, the fact that they existed at all shows that cartooning has deep roots in Canada while also showing that those roots are easily missed. A key conceit in contemporary Canadian cartoonist Seth’s metafictional The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists (2011) is that Townshend produced not only these cartoon images but also the first comic book in Canada, a long-lost artefact rediscovered more than a century after Townshend’s death, and that this holy grail of comics is one of the most treasured examples of Canada’s beloved art form. Sadly, the Canada of Seth’s book is an alternate-history Canada, one in which comics have played a more important role than they have ever played in reality, itself a reflection perhaps of the general invisibility of Canadian comics even within Canada (see Grace, Alternative History).

Canadian comics have always existed on the edge. Beginning with Townshend, Canadian cartoonists react against and exist outside of, if not in opposition to, the dominant milieu. The first real flowering of Canadian comics occurred to fill the void left when US comics disappeared from Canadian shelves, and that flowering withered shortly after US comics returned to Canada. The Conservation Act restrictions were softened in 1947, and by 1951 all restrictions on US imports ended. Only one Canadian comics company, Superior, was able to limp along for a few more years, before closing down in 1956, a decision which marked the death of the Canadian comic-book industry that had been born in 1941 (Bell, Invaders 96).

Apart from a handful of mainstay Canadian-produced comic strips, including, most notably, Jimmy Frise’s Birdseye Center (later renamed Juniper Junction), which ran from the 1920s until the late 1940s, and Juniper Junction artist Doug Wright’s Doug Wright’s Family (1949–80), the subsequent decades were lean years for homegrown comics, until the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which created a marketplace for alternatives to mainstream comics in Canada, as it did in the United States. Bell identifies three factors that contributed to this renaissance: the widespread growth of a youth counterculture, the flourishing of the literary small-press movement, and the emergence of a national comic-book fandom (Invaders 107). Small presses emerged, publishing art comics by creators such as bp nichol, while venues such as Vancouver’s underground paper, the Georgia Straight, and Montreal’s Logos offered venues for comics comparable to those provided by such US publications as the East Village Other or the Los Angeles Free Press, supporting a smaller-scale underground comix scene in Canada, the most notable representative of which was Rand Holmes, whose classic strip Harold Hedd initially ran in the Georgia Straight.² Holmes is one of the few Canadian cartoonists from this era whose work remains relatively easily accessible, since the Fantagraphics-published The Artist Himself: A Rand Holmes Retrospective (2010) offers both a biography and a generous selection of Holmes’s comix, and there is a recent though far from complete collection of the comics work of poet and performance artist bp nichol, as well: bp nichol comics, published in 2002 by Talon. As with the whites, though, most other Canadian underground comix or art comics from the mid-1960s through the 1970s remain out-of-print, in contrast to much US work of a similar vintage.

Canada also experienced its own version of the alternative comics explosion of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when small Canadian publishers again emerged in response to a burgeoning demand for alternative comics, thus providing Canadian equivalents to mainstream American comics (as with Comely Comics’s Captain Canuck, a rare and short-lived mid-1970s Canadian foray into four-color comics)—or to provide a unique venue for work creators either could not place or did not want to place with more mainstream publishers. Other short-lived experiments in early alternative or ground-level comics that might be likened to the material published by James Warren or by Mike Friedrich in Star*Reach (many Canadian creators in the 1970s published work both in Warren and Friedrich magazines as well as in their Canadian cousins), such as James Waley’s Orb (six issues, 1974–76) or Andromeda (six issues, 1977–79, published by the Silver Snail, one of Toronto’s premier—and still extant—comic book stores), briefly flourished but generally died out within a year or two of their initial appearances.

Although influenced by mainstream American comics and in some cases eager to work for Marvel or DC,³ many of the Canadian cartoonists who emerged during the alternative boom followed alternate paths. Some self-published. For example, Dave Sim not only founded Aardvark-Vanaheim, an early and significant self-publishing company that also published his comic Cerebus the Aardvark (as well as the work of a select few others, including Gene Day), but also became the medium’s most ardent advocate for self-publishing; Chester Brown initially self-published Yummy Fur as a mini-comic. Some also published with upstart Canadian companies such as Vortex (whose titles included Mister X and Yummy Fur, among others), Matrix (its most notable title was New Triumph, home of Mark Shainblum and Gabrielle Morrisette’s take on the Canadian superhero, Northguard⁴) or, later, the fine press Drawn & Quarterly—the sole remaining twentieth-century Canadian comics publisher still issuing significant amounts of new material, though not exclusively Canadian in origin.⁵

However, many Canadian cartoonists, whether they wanted to work within the mainstream, the alternative press, or the underground, had few domestic options. The Canadian companies that blossomed briefly during the black-and-white boom of the 1980s mostly faded away. Canadian cartoonists such as John Byrne,⁶ Todd McFarlane, Dale Keown, Darwyn Cooke, Jeff Lemire and others built careers in the US. Indeed, despite the overt Canadianness of Lemire’s first major work, Essex County, and its brief inclusion on CBC’s Canada Reads program,⁷ Essex County was published by Georgia-based Top Shelf Productions. Bryan Lee O’Malley’s similarly Canada-centric Scott Pilgrim series (explicitly set in Toronto, Ontario) was published by Oregon-based Oni Press. The Canadianness of Canadian cartoonists, then, is often hard to discern.⁸

Similarly, there is far from an abundance of criticism of Canadian comics, either domestic or otherwise. Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo’s recent survey of comics criticism, designed to explore questions of canonicity, shows that virtually no Canadian comics or cartoonists have received more than a handful of serious academic studies (including non-refereed work—though, to be fair, their research also shows that most non-Canadian comics have received little to no critical attention, as well),⁹ a conclusion that merely confirms Chris Reyns-Chikuma and Gail de Vos’s assertion that [s]ummarizing research on Canadian comics is simultaneously easy, because it seems that there is not much on the subject, and difficult, because it is scattered all over various media, technologies (paper, online), fields (literary studies, media studies, and comics studies), and the two official languages, and growing with new websites, articles, MA and PhD theses, and, recently, several books every year (5–6).¹⁰ (The reference to several books every year is to comics studies generally, not to multiple annual monograph-length studies of Canadian comics.) While there has been an upsurge in scholarship on Canadian comics recently—including the Eric Hoffman-edited Cerebus the Barbarian Messiah: Essays on the Epic Graphic Satire of Dave Sim and Gerhard (McFarland, 2012), Brian Evenson’s Ed Vs. Yummy Fur: or, What Happens when a Serial Comic Becomes a Graphic Novel (Uncivilized Books, 2014), Ian Brodie’s Old Trout Funnies: The Comic Origins of the Cape Breton Liberation Army (Cape Breton University Press, 2015),¹¹ the Candida Rifkind/Linda Warley-edited Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), the Chris Reyns-Chikuma and Gail de Vos-edited special issue of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (issue 43.1, March 2016), and Daniel Marrone’s Forging the Past: Seth and the Art of Memory (University Press of Mississippi 2016)—there is still remarkably little written about most major and all minor Canadian cartoonists. Thankfully, additional work is anticipated: a special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics focusing on younger Canadian cartoonists (proposed for 2018) and other projects are in development, including a proposed essay collection on Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (also from the University Press of Mississippi). Nevertheless, there remains room for more.

This present collection attempts to address some of the lacunae, in relation to the few cartoonists who have received study and the many who have not. Our definition of the Canadian alternative is intended to be interpreted broadly, applying not merely to alternative comics as narrowly defined but to the myriad ways that Canadian comics and cartoonists have functioned as alternatives—to American comics, to dominant discourses, even to gender and racial categories. We have attempted to cover a historical range as well as a diverse array of creators and perspectives. The essays herein also take alternative approaches to the comics they consider; some contributors engage with their material in conventional academic terms, but our broad sense of the alternative has led to the inclusion as well of essays that range from historical research through biography, historiography, and ethnography, as well as to more typically scholarly close readings and theoretically informed interventions.

The first section, Alternative History, is largely historical in focus, addressing chronological and biographical contexts with essays on the Canadian whites, government comics, and one of Canada’s most interesting cartoonists to bridge the mainstream/alternative divide, Gene Day. Ivan Kocmarek’s Alternatives within an Alternative Form: Canadian Wartime Creators Bus Griffiths, ‘Ab Normal,’ Avrom Yanovsky, Tedd Steele, and Jack Tremblay makes the case for some of the more outré cartoonists associated with the Canadian whites as precursors to the underground cartoonists of the 1960s. Mark J. McLaughlin’s The State as Alternative: Conceptualizing the Role of Historical Comics in Canada documents some of the ideologies, strategies, and achievements of seldom-seen and even more seldom-studied comics published by the government. In Gene Day, the Man Who Never Slowed Down, Jason Sacks offers a biographical look at a Canadian creator whose attempts to find success in the United States ended tragically.

The second section, Alternative Worlds, addresses Canadian regionalism, with essays centering on East Coast, Quebec, Ontario, and aboriginal comics. Ian Brodie’s Paul ‘Moose’ MacKinnon and an Alternative Cape Breton offers an ethnographic study of the comics work of Paul MacKinnon in his Old Trout Funnies, largely unknown to readers outside of Cape Breton Island. Michel Gets a Comics Job: Cartooning, Labor and Notions of the Alternative in the Comics of Michel Rabagliati, by Paddy Johnston, focuses, from an ecomonics perspective, on the work of Quebecois cartoonist Michel Rabagliati, while Annick Pellegrin’s Vicky: Young, Rich, Popular, Sexy, Gay, and Unhappy deals with a very different Quebec-based comic, through the lens of gender theory. "Nowadays and the Free Will Zombie Apocalypse," by Judith Leggatt, offers a close reading of the Thunder Bay-based zombie narrative Nowadays. Finally, in ‘Once Upon a Time This Was a True Story’: Indigenous Peoples Graphic Novels and Orature, Jessica Langston reads Indigenous Peoples comics in light of the narrative traditions of Indigenous cultures.

The third section, Alternative Comics, presents essays on Canadian alternative cartoonists. Eric Hoffman’s Cerebus the Canadian: Frontier Survivalism and Victimhood in Sim and Gerhard’s Epic largely turns away from the gender politics that frequently dominate discussion of Dave Sim and his collaborator Gerhard’s Cerebus, focusing instead on the much less frequently considered question of the extent to which Cerebus can be seen as a quintessentially Canadian work. In "Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken as Anti-Nostalgia, Dominick Grace challenges the dominant reading of Seth as a nostalgic cartoonist via a close reading of his first graphic novel. Jordan Bolay’s Louis Riel, Super-History Hero: The Politics of Representation in Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography addresses issues of identity and representation in Chester Brown’s highly regarded historical graphic novel. Daniel Marrone’s Hark! Anachronism: Kate Beaton’s Historiographic Metafiction" analyzes Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant in light of Linda Hutcheon’s theories of the postmodern. Ray Fawkes’s Formal and Stylistic Shifts in the Field of Comic Book Production, by Ruth-Ellen St. Onge, focuses on the mainstream/alternative divide by considering not only Fawkes’s formal stylistic choices but also how his work is marketed as either mainstream or alternative.

The fourth section, Alternative Perspectives, offers two pairs of essays, one on Nina Bunjevac and one on Jeff Lemire. This pairing brings together several alternatives at once. Bunjevac is a profoundly alternative cartoonist, whereas Lemire straddles the mainstream and alternative. Though born in Canada, Bunjevac spent her formative years in Serbia, so she approaches Canada from the outside, literally, whereas Lemire is firmly grounded in rural southern Ontario. And, of course, Bunjevac is a woman and Lemire a man. Consequently, these two artists view the world from very different gender, social, and aesthetic perspectives. Nevertheless, they are also similar in that both range widely in their work. While Lemire has produced a significant body of work for mainstream publishers, his roots are in the alternative, in the self-published Lost Dogs (2005) and the independent Essex County, and the two essays here address key works on each side of that divide, Essex County on the one side and the DC-published Trillium on the other. Similarly, Bunjevac’s work, though all outside the mainstream, ranges from essentially realistic biographical comics and memoir to anthropomorphic fantasy. Mihaela Precup’s "‘To Dream of Birds’: Autobiography, Photography, and Memory in Nina Bunjevac’s August, 1977’ and Fatherland focuses on Bunjevac’s more realistic work, while Laura A. Pearson’s Alternative Paradoxes in Heartless: The Bound and Transcultural Catwoman in Nina Bunjevac’s ‘Bitter Tears of Zorka Petrovic’ addresses her more fantastical output. Similarly, The Postcolonial Enterprise of Trillium: Maps, Language, Histories, and Multilateral Consciousness, by Joan Ormrod, offers a theoretically informed close reading of one of Lemire’s more mainstream works, while Jocelyn Froese’s Making Space for Making Space: Jeff Lemire’s Essex County and the Canadian Alternative" focuses on his widely recognized but rarely studied first major work. Again, both pairs of essays explore the range of their respective accomplishments.

This collection, therefore, ranges across the alternatives represented by the concept of alterity. It delves into Canadian comics as alternatives to US comics, and explores how Canadian comics have addressed the various alternate spaces within Canada both geographically¹² and socially. In addition to the two solitudes division between French and English Canada, Canada, in contrast to the melting pot associated with the US, has also conventionally been understood to be a social, cultural, and ethnic mosaic, with distinct cultural variations being part of its identity. These differences are often reflected in the highly regional and localized comics produced (e.g., Paul MacKinnon’s Cape Breton-Specific Old Trout Funnies, Michel Rabagliati’s Montreal-based Paul comics, Kurt Martell and Christopher Merkley’s Thunder Bay-specific zombie apocalypse). Furthermore, the essays here address the problematic treatment of aboriginal peoples, themselves as marginalized within Canada as Canadian comics have been within the larger comics world. The collection also considers some of the conventionally alternative cartoonists in the traditional sense of the term, offering alternative views of the diverse and engaging work of two very different Canadian cartoonists who bring their own alterity and alternatives into play: Lemire in his bridging of Canadian/US and mainstream/alternative sensibilities, and Bunjevac in her own bridging of realism and fantasy, as well as of insider/outsider status. Together, the essays collected here examine the work of several familiar cartoonists while also providing insight into some of the more obscure Canadian alternatives still awaiting full exploration.

We wish to thank the contributors for their hard work and patience. We also are grateful to Rebecca Heath for editorial assistance and to Lisa Macklem for help with permissions. We are also especially grateful to Bernie Mireault for producing a brand-new piece of art for the cover. For more information about this seminal Canadian cartoonist, see http://berniemireaultcomicart.tumblr.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/BEM999/.

DG

EH

NOTES

1. The Northern Lights are perhaps self-evidently a northern phenomenon; Canuck is a common slang term for Canadian; and Brock and Windsor are both universities in Ontario, the former in Saint Catharines—and named for Sir Isaac Brock, a key figure in the War of 1812 and therefore himself a Canadian hero of sorts—and the latter in Windsor.

2. The Straight was hardly an exclusively Canadian venue, as it also reprinted US comics, such as Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

3. For instance, Canadian illustrator Gene Day began his career publishing in alternative and ground-level books for small presses but ended his career—and his life—working for Marvel; cartoonist Chester Brown tried out for work with the American publishers; Cerebus creator Dave Sim auditioned to write and illustrate Marvel Comics’s Howard the Duck and published some short stories in Marvel’s Epic Illustrated; Seth’s first major work was on Dean Motter’s science fiction-inflected Mister X, published by Canadian company Vortex and a good example of the sort of alternative comic that attempted to bridge the gap between mainstream and independent sensibilities.

4. Chapterhouse Comics Group has mounted a Northguard reboot and planned to reprint Northguard’s original adventures—in color, rather than the original black and white—though this project was cancelled after the first issue. Matrix also published seminal early work such as Mackenzie Queen: Savior of the Universe (1985–86) and The Jam (initially as a back-up feature in New Triumph in 1984) by the cover artist for this volume, Bernie Mireault. The Jam’s protagonist has subsequently appeared sporadically in books from several publishers, most recently in Mireault’s self-published graphic novel To Get Her (2011), and Mireault continues to work on the character. For a recent reevaluation of Mireault and a recent interview, see Callahan.

5. Aardvark-Vanaheim still exists. It has recently published the new comic book Cerebus in Hell (2016–17) and is keeping the Cerebus volumes in print but is otherwise largely inactive; Sim has entered into publishing arrangements with IDW for new material as well as for some Cerebus-related work (e.g., the digital edition of High Society and a recently released [2016] collection of Cerebus covers).

6. Byrne was born in England but moved with his family to Canada at age eight. He is the creator of Marvel’s Canadian superhero team, Alpha Flight, including the patriotically clad team leader, Guardian, whose costume, like those of Captain Canuck, Northguard, and other explicitly Canadian superheroes, is modeled on the Canadian flag.

7. Canada Reads has been an annual program on Canada’s national public radio station CBC for over a decade. On the show, celebrity pundits each defend a book until, week by week, the list is boiled down to the one book Canadians should read. Essex County was the first book eliminated in the year it was included (2011).

8. A subtle but instructive instance is the palm trees that turn up in the background of David Boswell’s Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman (1978–98, 2002). Boswell’s work first appeared in the Georgia Straight, but the Reid Fleming comic book was published by Eclipse and his adventures were recently reprinted (2011) by IDW. Anyone looking at the strip would have no idea that it is Canadian, as visual cues (such as the palm trees) locate it in the southwestern USA.

9. See the chart on page 7, which—in a list of twenty-three cartoonists—includes only three Canadians as having had refereed or non-refereed academic study. Entirely absent from the list are figures such as Seth and Chester Brown, though whether this is because Beaty and Woo did not search for them or because nothing showed up when they did their research (both have in fact been the subject of academic inquiry) is unclear.

10. For a comprehensive though not complete list of scholarly work on Canadian comics as of 2015, see Reyns-Chikuma and de Vos 5–12.

11. The first two of these are not refereed, and the third is a history and comprehensive reprinting of Paul MacKinnon’s comics, rather than an analysis.

12. Canada, prior to the breaking up of the USSR, was the largest country in the world and remains, with an area of just under four million miles, the second-largest country in the world.

WORKS CITED

Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of all Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016.

Bell, John. Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe. Toronto: Dundurn, 2006.

Bell, John, ed. Canuck Comics. Montréal: Matrix Graphic Series, 1986.

Brumwell, Stephen. Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.

Callahan, Timothy. Bernie Mireault: The Forgotten Herald of the Modern. CBR.com, April 15 2009. http://www.cbr.com/254757–2/.

——. The Mireault Interview: 2009. CBR.com, April 22, 2009. http://www.cbr.com/254543–2/.

Desbarats, Peter, and Terry Mosher. The Hecklers: A History of Canadian Political Cartooning and a Cartoonist’s History of Canada. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979.

Grace, Dominick. An Alternative History of Canadian Cartooning. International Journal of Comic Art 17, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2016): 133–61.

"Heritage Minutes: Superman." Historicacanada.ca. https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/superman?.

Hou, Charles, and Cynthia Hou. Great Canadian Political Cartoons, 1820–1914. Vancouver: Moody’s Lookout Press, 1997.

Kocmarek, Ivan. WECA Comics: Canada’s Golden First Age of Comics. The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. 44th edition. By Robert M. Overstreet, 1160–77. Cockeysville: Gemstone Publishing, 2014.

Reyns-Chikuma, Chris, and Gail de Vos. Introduction. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 43, no. 1 (March 2016): 5–22.

Superman, 75th Anniversary. Canadapost.ca. https://www.canadapost.ca/web/en/blogs/collecting/details.page?article=2013/09/10/superman_75th_annive&cattype=collecting&cat=stamps.

Warner, Oliver. With Wolfe to Quebec: The Path to Glory. Toronto: Collins, 1972.

Werthman, William C. Canada in Cartoon: A Pictorial History of the Confederation Years, 1867–1967. Fredericton: University of New Brunswick Press, 1967.

Part I

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY

1

ALTERNATIVES WITHIN AN ALTERNATIVE FORM

Canadian Wartime Creators Bus Griffiths, Avrom Yanovsky, Ab Normal, Tedd Steele, and Jack Tremblay

IVAN KOCMAREK

Canada’s wartime comics, which I prefer to refer to as WECA¹ comics, began as a forced alternative to American comics during the Second World War. Indeed, it took the combination of a world war, an act of parliament, and a collection of out-of-work artists who were still reeling from the stark and somber years of the Depression, to bring into existence this genesis of Canadian comics.

Because of the government-imposed ban on American comics during the Second World War, new Canadian comics were not strictly an alternative to American comics, since there were virtually no American comics on the newsstands (some titles deemed to have educational value, such as those published by Parents’ Magazine Press—including True Aviation Picture Stories and True Comics, which changed its title to True Picture Magazine in Canada—were allowed through), but they did provide their Canadian audience with comics of a significantly different type than the American comics that had been available up to that time. These new Canadian comics represented a tangential shift from the comic template that had been provided by those now absent American comics. In this way, they represented an alternate form of comic book to a Canadian audience.

The first difference that readers encountered was that almost all the interiors of these comics were colorless, black-and-white-paneled pages, but, more than anything else, these WECA books were different from previously available American comics because they could be genuinely called Canadian. They better reflected a Canadian sociocultural core as a morsel of Canadian bacon between slices of over ‘ome British crumpet and wild west American cornbread. After all, this was a generation before Canada acquired its own flag or touted the 1967 Montreal World’s Exhibition, still known in Canada as Expo ’67, a generation that only began to self-identify as Canadians by the Summit Series of ’72.² In the 1940s, there was precious little other than the Second World War to tell Canadians who they were or who they were becoming.

In Truth, Justice, and the Canadian Way, I dealt with the nature of the specific Canadianness of Bell Features Publications in some detail. In general, I pointed out that these comics were born out of the history, politics, and economics of the Second World War. They were purely a Canadian product creating new Canadian comic book heroes, some of whom have become iconic (Nelvana and Johnny Canuck) and have often fought crime and the Axis on the Canadian homefront. Perhaps most significantly, they made the effort to engage their captive young Canadian audience with solicitations for input and criticism, through competitions and contests, and through the formation of clubs, all of which connected young Canadian wartime experiences from coast to coast and offered them what could be characterized as a primitive form of social networking.

These distinguishing qualities weren’t restricted to Bell Features comics but extended to the three other main comic book publishers from the era. Anglo-American Publications in Toronto (apart from its foray into the Fawcett universe) had its stable of Canadian heroes, such as the Crusaders, Commander Steele, Pat the Air Cadet, and the Men of the Mounted/Kip Keene. Maple Leaf Publications in Vancouver had an editorial message on page 17 of its first publication, Better Comics vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1941): This magazine, boys and girls, is drawn entirely by Canadian artists and published by a Canadian firm. Don’t you think that is something to be proud of? We do. The implication is that this product was distinctly Canadian, something different and worthwhile—something that Canadian readers had never had before and should therefore celebrate. In Montreal, Educational Projects’s flagship title, Canadian Heroes Comics, provided biographies of leading figures out of Canadian history as well as of major players in the ongoing war in Europe, stories of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the recounting of First Nations myths. In the fifth issue of the title, George Menendez Rae also created the fictional hero Canada Jack, a first-rate and upright Canadian specimen with hyperathletic ability. This was soon after followed by the founding of the Canada Jack Club for kids. Given all of this, there should be very little hesitation in calling Canadian Heroes Comics the most Canadian of all the titles from the WECA era.

These Canadian publishers didn’t need to imitate or produce facsimiles of American comics even though they must have been influenced, and in some way inspired, by the success the form had achieved south of the border. Canadian publishers had the benefit of a captive and eager audience and really didn’t have to answer to the market threat of American comics until the end of the war neared and the four-color juggernaut from the south started to push through the forty-ninth parallel.

Within this new, alternative template for comic books, there were a few creators who tried to reach a little further with their work and as a result produced something more than the usual or the expected fare. Among these was Bus Griffiths, with his Now You’re Loggin’ feature in the first dozen or so issues of Rocket Comics. This serialized, reality-based dramatic strip anticipated the idea of a graphic novel format a generation before it began to appear on comic book store shelves. The work of three Bell Features creators also stands out: Avrom Yanovsky, a left-wing, politically conscious firebrand, who produced a challenging strip about an armless war hero who became a secret agent, Major Domo and Jo-Jo, published in Joke Comics; the mysterious and off-the-wall creator who we know only through his pseudonym, Ab Normal, with his prescient, outlandish, and underground comix-looking characters and stories; and Tedd Steele, who, though he was among the most prolific of the mainstream Bell cartoonists, took off in a bit of a meta-comic direction for a handful of stories.

The first of these, Gilbert Joseph (Bus) Griffiths, was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan on July 9, 1913. He initially worked as a cataloger for farm implement manufacturer Massey-Harris but soon found his vocation as a faller (the person who is required to bring trees down with precision) in logging camps all over British Columbia throughout the 1930s and the first few years of the 1940s. Apart from logging, Griffiths loved to draw, but he had little success marketing his drawings to local newspapers until, by his own account, in the fall of 1941, he got a break:

I saw in the paper that the Maple Leaf comics were starting up and wanted cartoonists. I took in some of my old western strips. The editor [Vernon Miller?] was interested and asked me if I had any other