Tag Archives: Active Comics

Penny’s Diary

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Holy Cats!! Happy Valentine’s day everyone! In celebration of the occasion I’m posting an excerpt of the talk I’m giving later today on romance comics. Here it is, details of the talk are at the bottom.

Penny’s Diary was introduced around 1945 and is a cornerstone in Canadian comics history. Similar to Archie comics in style and content, the romance and drama In Penny’s Diary is targeted towards mainly teen girls. The story revolves around consistently lovesick Penny and her less than savoury, but levelheaded best friend, Jeanie.

Penny’s diary is a very interesting comic. Cyril Bell must have recognized the need to appeal to little girls when he published the comic but unfortunately not enough so that he created another line of comics targeted only for girls. Penny first appeared in number 19 of Active Comics. Laughably, Active Comics is generally what you’d expect, specializing in action heroes and sports. Also, during this time no stories were much longer than three or four pages of a book, and most books ranged from about 48 to 64 pages. This meant that poor Penny was wedged between Active Jim and Thunderfist and unfortunately the poor little girls who read them probably either paid a dime for one story or were forced to nick the comic from a brother.

Although Penny’s Diary is by no means a forward thinking comic, that it exists in itself is important. Penny’s diary is a comic for girls written by women, some of the first in the industry, Patricia Joudrey who wrote the script and Doris Slater who did the art. The series was short lived concluding with issue 26, and only marginally preceded the end of the Golden Age of comics in Canada.

If you’re interested in hearing more about Canadian romance and erotica comics, I will be giving a talk on this and more at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. The address is 395 Wellington and the talk begins at 7pm. Alternatively, I have given an interview to CBC radio which will be posted online.

Active Comics

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I loved the art for the mummy!

Active Comics was a comic anthology released irregularly from February of 1942 to 1946 and had a total of 28 issues. It was originally released while Bell Features was still called Commercial Signs of Canada, but after the third issue it changed over to Bell Features. Its more regular continuing comic included Dixon of the Mounted, The Noodle, The Brain, Thunderfist, Active Jim and Captain Red Thorton. Later on in the series Dr. Blue and Blackie and Penny’s Diary were introduced. It had short narratives written by Vic Griffin and several smaller “funny” and “gag” comics by Harry “Hy” Moyer, Mickey Lesik, Mickey Owens, Lou Skuce, Frank Keith and Harry Brunt as well as Peterson, Cal, and Thomas.

Some of the quirks. Active Comics was pretty consistent with artists/writers and story lines having a single artist cover a story for at least a couple of issues before passing it on. In the middle of the series the comic began to cover “The Panthers’” in the Toronto Hockey League although I’m pretty sure there were no actual artists on the team. This was also one of the only ways of distinguishing approximately when a comic was released since they ceased to put a date on the comics after the first three or four issues.

Another “funny” thing they did, was for issue 28, their comic line up was as follows: Torr: Interplanetary Space Detective, The Wing, Steve Storms, The Dreamer and the Polite Pirate, Guy Powers: Secret Agent and Tophat ’N’ Tales. I’m not sure if this was part of Cy Bell’s goal to change his lineup to compete with the American comics that were filtering back into the country or what. I guess only further research can tell. That said, only Fred Kelly remained of his original story comic artists.

Here are some of the regular artists that worked on the above storylines: Ed Legault, Murray Karn, Al Cooper, Ted Steele, Ross Saakel, Leo Bachle, Adrian Dingle, Kurly Lipas, Edmond Good, J. Henly, Mel Crawford, René Kulbach, Fred Kelly, Ed and Carl Alton, Patricia Joudrey and Doris Slater and who I believe are Jon Darian and André Kulbach although they did not sign their full name on the comics. Jerry Lazare, Paul Dak and Allan Ross Mendes worked on the final issue.

My favourite art was by Murray Karn, who by issue 13 had kind of disappeared. I’m curious to see if he turns up again in any of the other Bell Features early comics. All in all, the comic itself was pretty consistent, if not consistently issued, with regular cover art by Dingle and Good.