It was the opening of CBC-TV's "Hockey Night In Canada" for at least one season and it featured a "Field Of Dreams-like" sequence of stylized hockey players soaring on and off camera, around and about one another other on a multi-plane ice surface. The player's heads were blac...

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    Yard sales are a great place for cheap history lessons. Recently, I browsed at a community yard sale in my local area and came across a book by a Canadian cartoonist who was hitherto unknown by me.
    The book was a 1959 reprint of "Herbie!", by William Garnet "Bing" Coughlin, published by Nelson and Sons from 1946. The material in the comics seems best suited for those with military background and inclination, so most of the humor went over my head. I was a bit surprised at the ra...
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    Canadians have watched their game flogged and marketed like soap, ever since the game was introduced to Americans. The game just never reached the level of football, baseball and basketball, despite the sports greatest efforts.
    One of the techniques explored has been comics and cartooning, with varying and variable degrees of success. Animation icon Walt Disney, (whose father actually lived in Goderich, Ontario briefly), produced a couple of the earliest hockey cartoons: "The Hockey Ch...
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     Since I was a boy, the role and prominence of comics in the world has changed. First of all, publishing and the print medium has transferred over largely to the world of the internet and the explosion of something called "social media". The simple line cartoon seemed to be lost for a time, while newspapers downsized, or vanished altogether.
     However, there seems to be a brand new phenomenon bringing this style, perfected by such bygone stellar Canadian talents as Jimmy Frise, Doug Wri...
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