Canadian comics
Canadian comics refers to comics and cartooning by citizens of Canada or permanent residents of Canada regardless of residence. Canada has two official languages, and distinct comics cultures have developed in English and French Canada. The English tends to follow American trends, and the French, Franco-Belgian ones, with little crossover between the two cultures. Canadian comics run the gamut of comics forms, including editorial cartooning, comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, and webcomics, and are published in newspapers, magazines, books, and online. They have received attention in international comics communities and have received support from the federal and provincial governments, including grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. There are comics publishers throughout the country, as well as large small press, self-publishing, and minicomics communities.
In English Canada many cartoonists, from Hal Foster to Todd McFarlane, have sought to further their careers by moving to the United States; since the late 20th century increasing numbers have gained international attention while staying in Canada. During World War II, trade restrictions led to the flourishing of a domestic comic book industry, whose black-and-white "Canadian Whites" contained original stories of heroes such as Nelvana of the Northern Lights as well as American scripts redrawn by Canadian artists. The war's end saw American imports and domestic censorship lead to the death of this industry. The alternative and small press communities grew in the 1970s, and by the end of the century Dave Sim's Cerebus and Chester Brown's comics, amongst others, gained international audiences and critical acclaim, and Drawn & Quarterly became a leader in arts-comics publishing. In the 21st century, comics have gained wider audiences and higher levels of recognition, especially in the form of graphic novels and webcomics.
In French Canada indigenous comics are called BDQ or bande dessinée québécoise Cartoons with speech balloons in Quebec date to the late 1700s. BDQ have alternately flourished and languished throughout Quebec's history as the small domestic market has found it difficult to compete with foreign imports. Many cartoonists from Quebec have made their careers in the United States. Since the Springtime of BDQ in the 1970s native comics magazines, such as Croc and Safarir, and comics albums have become more common, though they account for only 5% of total sales in the province. Since the turn of the 21st century cartoonists such as Michel Rabagliati, Guy Delisle, and the team of Dubuc and Delaf have seen international success in French-speaking Europe and in translation. Éditions Mille-Îles and La Pastèque are amongst the domestic publishers that have become increasingly common.
History
English Canada
Early history (1759–1910s)
Brigadier-General George Townshend's cartoons lampooning General James Wolfe in 1759 are recognized as the first examples of political cartooning in Canadian history. Cartoons did not have a regular forum in Canada until John Henry Walker's short-lived weekly Punch in Canada débuted in Montreal in 1849. The magazine was a Canadian version of Britain's humorous Punch and featured cartoons by Walker. It paved the way for a number of similar short-lived publications, until the success of the more straight-laced Canadian Illustrated News, published by George-Édouard Desbarats beginning in 1869, soon after Canadian Confederation.In 1873, John Wilson Bengough founded Grip, a humour magazine in the style of Punch and the American Harper's Weekly. It featured a large number of cartoons, especially Bengough's own. The cartoons tended to be political, and Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and Métis rebel leader Louis Riel were favourite targets. The Pacific Scandal in the early 1870s gave Bengough much fodder to raise his reputation as a political caricaturist. According to historian John Bell, while Bengough was probably the most significant pre-20th-century Canadian cartoonist, Henri Julien was likely the most accomplished. Published widely both at home and abroad, Julien's cartoons appeared in periodicals such as Harper's Weekly and Le Monde illustré. In 1888, he gained employment at the Montreal Star and became the first full-time newspaper cartoonist in Canada.
File:Palmer Cox - Brownies reading a book.jpg|thumb|left|alt=|Palmer Cox had an international hit with The Brownies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Palmer Cox, a Canadian expatriate in the United States, at this time created The Brownies, a popular, widely merchandised phenomenon whose first book collection sold over a million copies. Cox began a Brownies comic strip in 1898 that was one of the earliest English-language strips, and had begun to use speech balloons by the time it ended in 1907.
Age of comic strips (1920s–1930s)
Canadian cartoonists often found it hard to succeed in the field of comic strips without moving to the US, but in 1921, Jimmy Frise, one of Ernest Hemingway's drinking buddies during the journalist's days in Toronto, sold Life's Little Comedies to the Toronto Stars Star Weekly. This strip was later retitled Birdseye Center, and became the longest-running strip in English Canadian history. In 1947, Frise brought the strip to the Montreal Standard, where it was renamed Juniper Junction. Nova Scotia-born artist J. R. Williams single-panel strip about rural and small-town life, Out Our Way, began in 1922 and was syndicated in 700 newspapers at its peak.Two new comic strips appeared on the same day in 1929 in American newspapers and fed the public's desire for escapist entertainment at the dawn of the Great Depression. They were the first non-humorous adventure strips, and both were adaptations. One was Buck Rogers; the other, Tarzan, by Halifax native Hal Foster, who had worked as illustrator for catalogues from Eaton's and the Hudson's Bay Company before moving to the US in his late 20s. Other adventure strips soon followed and paved the way for the genre diversity that was seen in comic strips in the 1930s. In 1937, Foster began his own strip, Prince Valiant, which has become his best-known work for Foster's dextrous, realistic artwork. After struggling to support himself at various Toronto-based publications, Richard Taylor, under the pen name "Ric", became a regular at The New Yorker and relocated to the US, where the pay and opportunities for cartoonists were better.
The Toronto Telegram began to run Men of the Mounted in 1933, the first home-grown adventure strip, written by Ted McCall and drawn by Harry Hall. McCall later penned the strip Robin Hood and Company, which made its appearance in comic books when McCall founded Anglo-American Publishing in 1941.
Golden age: Canadian Whites (1940s)
The Golden Age of Comic Books and subsequent superhero boom began with the release in June 1938 of Action Comics #1. The cover story was the first appearance of Superman, drawn by Toronto-born Joe Shuster. Shuster modeled Superman's Metropolis after his memories of Toronto, and the newspaper Clark Kent worked for after the Toronto Daily Star, which he had delivered as a child. These comics crossed the border and quickly gained Canadian fans as well.In December 1940, the War Exchange Conservation Act was passed. It restricted the importation of goods from the US that were deemed non-essential to combat the trade deficit Canada had with its neighbours to the south. American comic books were casualties of the Act. In 1941, to fill the void, a number of Canadian comic book publishers sprang up, starting in March with Anglo-American Publishing in Toronto and Maple Leaf Publishing in Vancouver. Adrian Dingle's Hillborough Studios and Bell Features soon joined them. The comics printed by these companies had colour covers, but the innards were in black-and-white, and thus collectors call them Canadian Whites. Superheroes stories were prominent, and the "Whites" often relied on serials to keep readers coming back for more.
Better Comics from Maple Leaf and Robin Hood and Company from Anglo-American were the first titles to hit the stands. Robin Hood was a tabloid-sized comic strip reprint magazine, while Better was made up of original material in traditional comic-book format, and thus can be said to be the first true Canadian comic book. It included the appearance of the first Canadian superhero, Vernon Miller's Iron Man. John Stables, under the pen name John St. Ables, was responsible for Brok Windsors debut in Better in the spring of 1944—a fantasy-adventure set far in the "land beyond the mists" in the Canadian North. The success of Better led to a proliferation of titles from Maple Leaf.
File:Nelvana2Cover.jpg|right|thumb|alt=|Adrian Dingle's Nelvana of the Northern Lights, Canada's first female superhero
The driving creative forces behind Anglo-American were Ted McCall, the writer of the Men of the Mounted and Robin Hood strips, and artist Ed Furness. The pair created a number of heroes with such names as Freelance, Purple Rider, Red Rover, and Commander Steel. Anglo-American also published stories based on imported American scripts bought from Fawcett Publications, with fresh artwork by Canadians to bypass trade restrictions. Captain Marvel and Bulletman were amongst the characters that had Canadian adaptations. Anglo-American published a large number of titles, including Freelance, Grand Slam, Three Aces, Whiz, Captain Marvel and Atom Smasher, but relied less on serials, and was less patriotically Canadian than its rival publishers. It employed a number of talented artists, but they were kept to a "house style" of drawing, in the vein of Captain Marvel's C. C. Beck.
In August 1941, three unemployed artists, Adrian Dingle and André and René Kulbach, formed Hillborough Studios to publish their own work. They started with Triumph-Adventure Comics, whose star was Canada's first female superhero, Nelvana of the Northern Lights, who appeared several months before Wonder Woman did in the US. Nelvana was inspired by tribal stories brought back from the Arctic Group of Seven painter Franz Johnston. The popular fur-miniskirted superheroine was a powerful Inuit mythological figure, daughter of a mortal woman and Koliak the Mighty, King of the Northern Lights. She had telepathic powers and was able to ride the Northern Lights at the speed of light, turn invisible, and melt metal.
In March 1942, Dingle and most of the Hillborough staff moved with Nelvana to Toronto-based Bell Features, which had begun publishing comics in September 1941 with the first issue of the successful Wow Comics—in colour at first, but Bell soon switched to the familiar "White" format. Bell was the most prolific of the Canadian comic-book publishers. Its comics were drawn by a large pool of artists, including freelancers, adolescents, and women, and were unabashedly Canadian. Aside from Nelvana, there were Edmund Legault's Dixon of the Mounted, Jerry Lazare's Phantom Rider, and Fred Kelly's Doc Stearne. Leo Bachle's Johnny Canuck was the second Canadian national hero, and debuted in Bell's Dime Comics in February 1942.
The new Canadian comics were successful; Bell reached accumulated weekly sales of 100,000 by 1943. By this time, Educational Projects of Montréal had joined, selling comics in the "White" format. Educational specialized in a different sort of fare: biographies of prime ministers, cases of the RCMP, and historical tales, drawn by accomplished artists including George M. Rae and Sid Barron. Educational's Canadian Heroes earned endorsements from cabinet ministers and appealed to parents and educators, but was not as appealing to the kids it was aimed at until Rae convinced publisher Harry J. Halperin to allow him to include a fictional character, Canada Jack — a hero who battled Nazis.
With the end of World War II in 1945, Canadian comic-book publishing faced competition from American publishers again. Educational and latecomer Feature Publications folded immediately. Maple Leaf tried to compete by switching to colour and by trying to break into the British market. Anglo-American and another newcomer, Al Rucker Publications, tried to compete directly with the Americans, and even achieved distribution in the US. By the end of 1946 it was clear that the remaining publishers could not compete, and for the time being original comic-book publishing came to an end in Canada, although some publishers like Bell Features survived by republishing American books until the War Exchange Conservation Act was officially abolished in 1951. The cartoonists who insisted on drawing for a living faced several choices: some moved across the border to attempt to make it with the American publishers, and some moved into illustration work, as Jerry Lazare, Vernon Miller, Jack Tremblay, and Harold Bennett did. Another avenue was the route Sid Barron followed into political cartooning. By 1949, out of 176 comics titles on the newsstand, only 23 were Canadian.