REVIEW: THE ESSENTIAL BOOTLEG COMICS & STORIES by MEL TAYLOR

 

The Essential Bootleg Comics & Stories
by Mel Taylor
illustrated by R.G. Taylor
Studio Comix Press
2026

review by BK Munn

Because I'm embracing "all things Waterloo," the only new comic I picked up this week was this fluorescent banana yellow (picture doesn't do it justice) collection of fugitive pieces by Mel Taylor and R.G. Taylor. All these short stories are written by Mel Taylor, a local beatnik type, and illustrated by his cousin R.G. Taylor, who comic book fans might recognize as the artist behind the exquisite 1980s series Wordsmith, about a 1930s pulp magazine writer, and a short but beautiful early run on the Sandman Mystery Theatre comic series ("The Brute"). The short stories in this book are polished autobiographical reflections on personal heroes, childhood memories, and being down and out; bite-sized, slice-of-life haikus. The narration is poetic in an unpretentious, quotidian style, and the artwork is on point, with R.G.'s expressive (photo-referenced?) linework getting at the heart of things. I was pleased to learn the cousins grew up in Fergus, Ontario, along the Grand River, where I also spent part of my childhood, and in addition to Mel's memories of reading Jack Kirby Fantastic Four comics as a kid, there are two short strips about the local comic shops in the K-W region, the long-gone Now & Then Books, where I bought the first issue of Wordsmith back in the 80s, and the shop where I bought this book, Carry-On Comics.

Unknown Canadian Cartoonist: Joe Cushner

by BK Munn 

Unknown Canadian Cartoonists: Joe Cushner

My brother, who lives in B.C., sent me these images from an exhibit at the VISAC Gallery in Trail. The artist Joe Cushner worked for the Cominco Smelter doing safety posters and cartoons.

The Art of Health and Safety:

Joe Cushner, Cominco Staff Artist (1950s – 70s)

https://www.visacgallery.com/welcome-to-visac

https://www.rosslandmuseum.ca/cominco

PIERRE FOURNIER, 1949-2022: Creator of Capitaine Kébec and Red Ketchup comics

Obituary by BK Munn

Pierre Fournier, the iconoclastic Quebec cartoonist, died November 11 of complications arising from Lewy body dementia. 

Fournier was at the vanguard of Québécois artists who began making funny, political French-language comics in the 1960s and 1970s. He self-published the groundbreaking superhero satire Les Aventures du Capitaine Kébec and went on to transform the character into a sort of mascot for the francophone comics community, with a a comics-themed tv show, "Les Amis du Capitaine Kébec", as well as more comics and strips. Fournier was among the first contributors to the humour magazine Croc, and introduced another long-running character, Michel Risque, in its pages in 1979. Co-created with artist Réal Godbout, the violent adventure comics parody and its spin-off, Red Ketchup, were intermittently-published in a variety of formats over the following decades (recently reissued in a series of graphic novels by La Pasteque). A Red Ketchup animated cartoon series is set to debut in 2023.

Outside of Croc, Fournier also contributed to the magazine Titanic and the Quebec edition of Mad. He edited his own short-lived humour magazine Anormal in 1991, and was an editor and art director for Matrix Comics. His contributions to comics were recognized with the inaugural Albert Chartier Award and the induction into the Joe Shuster Awards hall of fame in 2008.

As well as writing for film and television, Fournier organized exhibits about the history of Quebec bande dessinée beginning in the 1970s and was something of a comics, science fiction and horror pop culture historian, running a well-regarded blog, Frankensteinia, about aspects of the Frankenstein mythos for many years.

Fournier suffered from a lengthy illness and had been in long-term care since February. His death was confirmed by friends and family through Fournier's page on Facebook.

First Doug Wright's Family in The Canadian, 1967

Originally published in the nationally syndicated magazine Weekend (originating in the Montreal Standard but included as an insert in different papers across the country), the comic strip "Doug Wright's Family" moved to upstart competitor The Canadian in 1967. Here's the first strip from The Canadian, printed with a short article trumpeting their new acquisition, with a great photo of Doug Wright, pictured with his eldest son. Both magazines were general interest publications with features for the whole family, from political news, to sports, fashion, celebrity profiles, and weird Cold War fantasies like the one pictured here. The two magazines merged 10 years later.

Early Darwyn Cooke Comics from Music Express

by BK Munn

Cartoonist Darwyn Cooke (1962-2016) got his start in the Toronto magazine world back in 1984 when he was hired as the art director for Music Express. He did all the design, graphics and even some photography for that magazine, and its sister mag Metallion, until he left to work for one of Canada’s biggest fashion magazines, Flare, in 1988. Looking at these issues of Music Express, you can see how Cooke was applying a retro mid-century design sense to its pages in a style that nevertheless still retains a very hip 1980s feel. The pages from this 1985 issue are crammed with Cooke’s spot illustrations and there is even a house ad done in the form of a comic strip. This is some of Cooke’s earliest published comics. 

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.