Antique Show Comics, part 1: Canadian Red Ryder Comics

I bought this from a toy vendor this weekend not because I like these comics but because I don't have any of this particular type. You hardly see these Canadian editions of Dell Comics (I wish it was a Little Lulu!). Less pages than the U.S. issues and blank inside covers. Subscription coupon on the back cover. Published by The Wilson Publishing Company, 123 Eighteenth Street, New Toronto. Established during the WECA embargo on U.S. comics, the company kept chugging along until I believe the Comics Code came along.

More on this postwar period of comics publishing in Canada.

Sleepin' Lena by Erich F.T. Schenk

My new favourite comic book character is Sleepin' Lena, the anthropomorphic lady cat afflicted with hypersomnia. Lena was written and drawn by Erich F.T. Schenk, an American journeyman cartoonist who worked for a variety of publishers in the 1940s, and also for the Fleisher animation studio, where he provided surreal background paintings for Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. Lena appeared in only a handful of stories in different titles. In each story, Lena gets a new job but falls asleep and has a dreamlike adventure before getting fired. I love the character especially because of this story where she is hired as a soda jerk in a candy store, just like my store! A truly weird character at the intersection of race and gender. The comics historian Cheryl Spoehr has posited that Lena is a literary "type" based on stereotypes of people of colour, especially broken down maids, found in popular American books and other media of the early 20th Century. Perhaps the name is borrowed from Lena Horne, who was at the height of her early success in the 1940s?

(from Merry-Go-Round Comics 1945, nn --only issue, published by American Comics Group) 

Canadian Cartoonist Project: Joe Cranswick

by BK Munn

I came across an auction for this postcard on Ebay. The seller is a stamp dealer and apparently bought this as part of collection featuring famous and not-so-famous cartoonists. It looks like the sort of project a fan or hobbyist (or burgeoning cartoonist) would do, writing away to every cartoonist with a public address and asking for a free sketch. The collection comes from Abilene, Texas, which makes it all the stranger that the collector tracked down the totally unknown cartoonist Joseph "Joe" Cranswick of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Joe Cranswick was a newspaper cartoonist, but for what Vancouver newspaper I'm uncertain. The card is postmarked 1947, so he must have been at work there at that time. In later years (through the 1960s) he was the editor of Thy Kingdom Come, a magazine published by The Association of the Covenant People, to all appearances a Vancouver offshoot of the Christian sect of British Israelites, which still has a church in Burnaby, BC. (There was a Joe Cranswick who worked as a CBC technician in the 1960s and 1970s in Burnaby as well, but I'm not sure if he's the same).

The address on the card still exists in Vancouver. I just started on this mystery, so it's still a work in progress.