SMALL TYPES: "THE MAGAZINE FOR YOUNG CANADIANS"

 

SMALL TYPES Magazine, Volume 2, #3 (May 1955). Small Types Club was a CBC radio and tv lunchtime kids show in the 1950s that was hosted by Byng Whitteker. The bi-monthly magazine, founded and edited by Stella Craig, served as a complement to the show and was sort of like a Canadian version of Highlights Magazine, with stories and activities and, shockingly, multiple pages of comics! It looks like every issue during this period had a comics insert bound in, and this issue reprints full-colour stories from Felix the Cat # 55, published a few months earlier in the USA (by Toby PRESS, September 1954). There were Canadian editions of Felix published in the 1950s by Superior Publication, so maybe Small Types, printed in comic book size, was associated with Superior in some way, or perhaps was printed by Superior on their presses. The reprinted Felix material is by Otto Mesmer and Joe Oriola.

COMICS IN FILM: PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026), DIRECTED BY PHIL LORD & CHRISTOPHER MILLER

Comics in Film: Project Hail Mary (2026), directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller 

by BK Munn

Ryan Gosling sports a vintage B. Kliban cat t-shirt in this fun heart-warmer of a sci-fi movie about a reluctant scientist hero who travels to another solar system to try to save the earth from a solar apocalypse. Gosling's vintage wardrobe is on point throughout the film (that Mary Maxim wolf sweater!), and this t-shirt, seen throughout the film, encapsulates his disheveled hippy aesthetic and, in a sense, his entire personality: The astronaut is chosen for the interstellar suicide mission in part because he has no-one to love in his life, not even a pet, but is inexplicably attached to the cat-themed tourist t-shirt from his hometown San Francisco. Cartoonist B. Kliban (1935 – 1990) lived in the Bay Area himself and his world-renowned surrealist cartoons and cats are still popular today and, apparently, in the future.