Turning one’s passion for a particular area of character collectibles into a living is a common enough story among serious collectors, but converting that fervor into something that lasts and provides a service to one’s fellow enthusiasts is a level to which many aspire and few achieve. Bruce Canwell is one of the few. Under the aegis of former Eclipse Comics founder Dean Mullaney, he helps operate The Library of American Comics, which has packaged the beautifully produced and well received hardcover collections of Terry and the Pirates and Little Orphan Annie for IDW Publishing. They have just released Scorchy Smith and The Art of Noel Sickles, a volume that seems destined to establish a new standard for such projects.

The 49 year-old Canwell was born in Brunswick, Maine in 1959 and grew up there, though for the last 15 years he’s called Boston home (“Yes, I was in the house back in June when the Celtics beat the Lakers to win their 17th world championship. That was a wonderful experience!”). He started early with comic strips in the daily newspaper, ranging from The Phantom to Red-Eye, but he said his focus was definitely comic books. 

“Brunswick is the home of Bowdoin College, so we had an excellent newsstand in town. At age eight, I went there armed with about three dollars and walked out with a copy of every comic they had on the stands. At 12¢ a piece in those days, a dollar bought you a lot of comics!” he said.

“I dabbled with other things here and there, but basically I started out a Marvel fan, arriving as I did at the back-end of the Silver Age. I was around for Jack Kirby’s last two years on Fantastic Four and Thor, for Steranko’s Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, and Captain America, for Gene Colan’s Daredevil, for Roy Thomas and Neal Adams on X-Men and Thomas and John Buscema on The Avengers. Even today, I retain vivid memories of where I bought and first read key issues like Amazing Spider-Man #90, featuring the death of Captain Stacy. 

His tastes continued to develop from that point, and he credits Mullaney with his continued interest in the medium at an age when many have at least drifted away from comics for a while.

“Actually, Dean was instrumental in keeping me involved with comics back in the late ’70s. My interest was flagging when I got a mail-order solicitation for Sabre, which was the first publication by Dean’s groundbreaking company, Eclipse Comics. On one hand, I was appalled: ‘Five bucks  for one comic? That’s highway robbery!’ On the other hand, Sabre was created by Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy. I admired both men’s work, and if I was thinking of walking away from it all, why not have one last splurge before leaving?” he said.  

“Then I received Sabre and thought it was great. That revived my interest and kept me around for the ‘independent’ movement in the 1980s. That also meant I was around for the first major wave of comic strip reprints during that decade: Kitchen Sink’s Steve Canyon, Flash Gordon, and Li’l Abner, Eclipse doing Krazy Kat, Fantagraphics with Popeye. And I’m forever indebted to Fantagraphics for publishing Nemo, a magazine devoted to the history of the comic strip. That was like a college course in comic strips at a time when the idea of any school hosting such a course was unimaginable.”

He said his formative experiences as a fan might seem old fashioned today, but there they were nonetheless powerful.

“I was a Marvel Comics letterhack. I’m sure I had over a hundred letters published during my teenaged years. Folks like Dean and Ralph Macchio and Mark Gruenwald and Jo Duffy and a handful of others were also letterhacks; that’s how Dean got my name and address to send me the flyer advertising Sabre,” he said. “Having that information appearing regularly in Marvel Comics drove my secondary formative experience. Buying comics in Maine in the 1970s was a solitary pursuit, but an enterprising fan named Mike Dudley decided to try to find other area fans and get them together. He actually founded a Maine Comics Club, and he drafted me into it. I think it was a revelation for many of us: ‘Hey, whaddaya know, I’m not the only person in Maine who read comics, after all!’ Several of us had a variety of other shared interests as well, so thirty years later, even though we’ve scattered across a number of different states, I still maintain friendships that began with the Maine Comics Club.”

He jokes that he took the path to turn from a fan into a professional by “Being too stupid to know when to quit,” but in truth he said that he knew even before high school that he wanted to write, and not just comics.

“I’ve been a movie reviewer, I’ve had short fiction published, I reviewed books for the magazine Tomorrow Science Fiction. The fellow who hired me for that gig was named Algis Budrys. He was a book reviewer himself, and for several years in my teens and early twenties, I read and learned from his book reviews in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was such a rush to have someone whose work I had admired decide that my stuff was good enough for him to buy. Budrys died just a few months ago, and I was saddened to read about his passing, because working for him was a major gut check for me, a sort of validation that I truly did have the right stuff,” Canwell said.

These days his collection fills bookshelves and bookshelves of his favorites. In addition to those Steve Canyon and Flash Gordon reprints from Kitchen Sink he mentioned, those shelves are packed with a complete run of the DC Archives, the first one hundred Marvel Masterworks, Drawn & Quarterly’s Walt & Skeezix, Gemstone’s EC Archives, and Fantagraphics’s Krazy Kat and Peanuts.

“I’ll admit it, I’m even re-buying Popeye to see the Sunday pages in color,” he laughed.

“I also buy single artist collections, like Flesk Publications’ wonderful James Bama: American Realist and Franklin Booth: Painter With A Pen. I read a variety of fiction, too: everyone from J.G. Ballard to Tom Sharpe to Harlan Ellison to William Goldman. My biggest problem these days is that I buy more books than I have time to read!”

He said that he defines the prizes of his personal collection based on their sentimental worth rather than a dollar value.

“For instance, I have a complete set of Doc Savage Bantam Books paperbacks because in my pre-teen years, I was a huge Doc Savage fan, and even today, I’d give a lot to try my hand doing Lester Dent pastiche on an original Doc novel or comics series. I have a truly one-of-a-kind issue of Tomb of Dracula #70, the last issue of the series. It has two complete copies of the interior pages bound between one set of covers! Then there is Batman: The Gauntlet, the Prestige format one-shot I wrote for DC Comics, working with artist Lee Weeks, who’s one of those long time Maine Comics Club friends of mine,” he said.

“Of course, the Library of American Comics books are a continuous delight, and here’s an example of one of the benefits of working on them. Look at page 23 of Terry and the Pirates Volume 3. Do you see that July 14 oversized color guide Caniff prepared for his 1940 Manhattan art gallery show? The original hangs on my living room wall, and it is a true thing of beauty,” he said.

As a reader, he thinks this is in many ways a new Golden Age for comics.

“My long time favorite comic strips and comic books are now out in permanent editions. There are a number of contemporary people doing interesting work (here are a handful of names, at random, who almost always cause me to cough up the sheckles: Dan Brereton, Terry Moore, Mike Mignola, Darwyn Cooke, Jason Lutes). And now more than ever, there is such a wide array of styles and formats to choose from, it’s hard for me to imagine that everyone can’t find something that will catch their fancy.”

Of course Canwell himself is playing a significant role in engendering and promoting this new Golden Age.

“As a writer, I’m interested in tackling as many exciting projects as I can handle, and I’m lucky to be playing Watson to Dean’s Holmes at The Library of American Comics, because he and I are really in sync in our approaches, tastes, and goals, and we’re both dedicated to creating the absolute best books possible. We do our share of hard work, but we also have one whole lot of fun!” he said.

In planning, researching and developing the various volumes of The Library of American Comics, each of the projects comes with a different set of problems, ones that many serious collectors can appreciate.

“The good news is, the fun far outweighs any difficulties we encounter! I’d say our two biggest difficulties are, one, insuring we can locate useable copies of all the comic strips we need for any given book. So far we’ve been fully successful in that regard, though sometimes it’s taken a little longer than we expected to locate everything we need. Two, our eyes are bigger than our bellies: we have more projects we’d like to do than there are hours in the day to do them! As problems go, of course, that’s a good one to have,” he said.

He attributes much of their success to his nigh constant communication with Mullaney practically seven days a week.

“We’re continuously swapping ideas and material, looking for the best ways to integrate the articles into the overall design of each book. We also try really hard to locate photos and artwork that will help illuminate the text,” he said. He also credits Randy Scott, the Comic Art Bibliographer at Michigan State University, who prepares the index in each of our books.

“He often has the tightest deadlines of any of us, and his indexes always amaze me with their thoroughness and detail. I don’t know how he does it; in my eyes, he’s like a magician,” he said.

Canwell said that the Terry and the Pirates books have been the easiest to prepare thus far, if only because there’s such an abundance of riches attached to that series, not just in the strips themselves, but also in terms of information available.

“Caniff donated all his papers to Ohio State, and going through them is a real delight. Every comic strip fan should consider making a pilgrimage to the Cartoon Research Library. Seeing the breadth of material that Caniff saved is an education in itself,” he said.

Alternately, he tagged the first volume of Little Orphan Annie and the newly released Scorchy Smith and The Art of Noel Sickles as the most challenging to date.

“It was something of a challenge to find all those very early strips. When we first announced we were going to go back to the very beginning on Annie, a few people told us they thought it would be impossible to locate all the strips, because several of them had never been reprinted. It took some doing, but not only did we find them all, we discovered a ‘lost’ strip that was in Harold Gray’s papers at Boston University. It was a thrill to have that strip see the light of day for the very first time in our book!” he said. “The difficulty in Scorchy was primarily the scope and magnitude of the project. There were days last winter when I wondered how it was ever going to come together, yet once the pieces began to fall into place, the book came together like a dream. So far the people who’ve seen the book indicate they’re pleased with our results. That’s gratifying, and it’s also a reminder that good, honest work comes with its own rewards.”

The results have, thus far, been spectacular, including a mix of great reviews, solid sales, and even an Eisner Award. He said it was particularly gratifying to have Terry Volume 1 win the Eisner for Best Archival Collection this year in San Diego. (“It’s our Little Engine That Could!”)

While that book marked the first time he or Mullaney had undertaken that kind of an effort, Scorchy Smith and The Art of Noel Sickles is easily their most ambitious project for the imprint thus far. Canwell said the move from Terry and Annie to the scope of the Scorchy book was not as big as it might seem thanks to a handful of factors.

“First, you can’t work on Terry without at least brushing up against Noel Sickles and his work on Scorchy. Second, both Dean Mullaney and I were already somewhat familiar with Scorchy. For instance, I still own the 1980s Kitchen Sink Press Steve Canyon issues that reprinted several months of Scorchy continuity. Third, Dean and I wanted to do a stand alone volume of some sort in the first year of The Library of American Comics. With all those ingredients bubbling in the mix, it was almost inevitable that we would do this book,” he said.

In putting together this volume, Mullaney and Canwell burned up the phone and Internet lines with constant calls and emails. They made two trips to the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University to examine their Noel Sickles collection in November 2007 and March 2008. There they were assisted by Lucy Shelton Caswell, Susan Liberator, and the staff there. They located copies of all the various interviews Sickles had done during the course of his career, spoke with people who knew him, and with comic strip experts. They did genealogical research online, scoured newspaper archives for stories about Sickles, and initiated data searches at the National Archives.

It was a long process, but to what end?

On the surface, Scorchy Smith doesn’t seem like a strip that one would compare favorably with Terry and the Pirates, Little Orphan Annie or any of the others Canwell has noted. And based on his short tenure in the field of comic strip creation, Noel Sickles also seems an unlikely candidate for this type of treatment. The true story, though, is in the details, and Canwell and Mullaney have pulled the material together in such a fashion that the influence of Scorchy and Sickles on the industry as a whole may now truly come to light.

When Noel Sickles took over Scorchy Smith in December of 1933, it was the most lucrative comic in the Associated Press stable, Canwell said. They feared a change in art styles might cause newspapers to drop the strip, so they instructed Sickles to imitate his predecessor, John Terry.

“Now, John Terry had a lot of limitations as an artist, he wasn’t good enough to carry Noel Sickles’s pencil box, but Sickles did what was expected of him. He dumbed down his own skills until his employers were comfortable with him. Then Sickles began to put his own distinctive stamp on the material,” he said.

“In his Introduction to our book, Jim Steranko does a brilliant job of describing the evolution of Sickles’s art on Scorchy. Within three months, by March of 1934, it’s clear Sickles has begun doing his own thing. On April 2, he starts signing the strip with his own name instead of John Terry’s. No more ghosting for Sickles. By mid-May he begins using bold blacks to depict drapery, and by October of 1934 he’s using graytones (Ben Day and Double-Tone board) in ways that had never before been seen in comics,” Canwell said.

Sickles amped up the dramatic potential inherent in comics visuals by experimenting with light sources and using solid black as a design element, the “chiaroscuro effect.” His work on Scorchy Smith taught a number of comic strip artists to follow in his footsteps, men like Mel Graff, Frank Robbins, Alfred Andriola, and Charles Raab, he said.

“By the 1950s, artists like Alex Toth were studying Scorchy and applying the lessons they learned to the comic books they were drawing at that time. Sickles’s legacy continues to this day, the chiaroscuro lineage that starts with him and Scorchy and runs through Caniff and Toth and continues all the way up to Frank Miller and Sin City,” he said.

In reading the book, it’s clear that Sickles and Terry and the Pirates creator Milton Caniff became fast friends. Canwell said they were two sides of the same coin.

“They were both born and reared in Ohio, they both grew up wanting to be newspaper artists, and both admired the famous Billy Ireland of the Columbus Dispatch. Both were loaded with natural talent. Yet Caniff was more organized and practical than Sickles, and even though Caniff knew how to inject humor into his work, it was Sickles who was the natural comedian. He could tell a joke and Caniff would start cracking up halfway to the punchline. Each mastered skills the other did not have, and I think that fed their mutual admiration while also serving them both a little humble pie. Each could honestly say, “Oh, I could never do thus-and-so as well as he does!” So their talent overlapped in some areas and was totally distinctive in other areas. It was a good, healthy blend,” he said.

“Caniff was older than Sickles, and sometimes he acted the part of the big brother. When Sickles was still in Ohio, looking for that big break, Caniff was living and working in New York, and he stayed in regular touch, encouraging Sickles to be patient and keep at it. When there was a staff artist position open at the Associated Press in Manhattan, Caniff campaigned for them to hire Sickles, which is what brought Noel to New York and gave his career its first big boost,” he said.

Still, it was Sickles who taught Caniff his chiaroscuro techniques, he pointed out.

“Caniff took that concept and ran with it to great success in Terry and the Pirates, continuing to use it to great effect in Steve Canyon. So they helped one another a lot, pushed each other a bit, and had each other’s backs whenever the sledding got rough. It really was a very special friendship.”

The process of researching both the strip and the artist was something of an eye opener. Initially they thought they were doing a Scorchy Smith book with a supplemental chapter on Noel Sickles’ post-comics career. The more they discovered there, it seemed as if the opposite was coming true.

“Both Dean and I were aware of a smattering of the work Sickles had done after he left Scorchy Smith, and once we felt confident we could find all the Sickles Scorchy, we figured we’d do an “Art of Noel Sickles” section to supplement the comic strips. But the more we researched and spoke with people, the more wonderful stuff we uncovered, the bigger the art section became, and the more my biographical essay expanded,” Canwell said.

He said there were two main factors that surprised him during the process.

“First, the sheer breadth of Sickles’s artistic talent – when we were at Ohio State in the spring, we got our first look at pieces like ‘Wasp Splits the Hobson,’ which we included on page 100 of the book, or the Sickles illustrations for The Bridges Of Toko-Ri, or his many beautiful Western paintings. Our jaws would drop and our eyes would bulge like characters in a Bob Clampett cartoon, because it was hard to believe one man could work in such a wide range of styles and produce such powerful work in all of them,” he said. “Second, from a writing standpoint, that springtime trip to Ohio State created a major ‘Ah-Hah!’ moment for me. I’d been accumulating pieces of the Sickles puzzle for months, but going through Sickles’ papers at Ohio State helped me begin to see how the pieces all fit together. My keyboard really started to clatter once I got back from Ohio!”

When searching for the most compelling thing about Noel Sickles, Canwell said it would be easy to point to his genius or the versatility of his talent.

“But what really resonated with me about Sickles is something personal: I was drawn to how close he was to his family, even though he was geographically separated from them. His parents and siblings were scattered all over the country while he lived in Washington D.C. and later in Connecticut, but he often visited his brother who lived in Pennsylvania, and he literally spent years showing off the artwork his father created, trying to get it published. Finally, a magazine called Lithopinion put some of that work into print, and that must have been a tremendously satisfying moment for Sickles. I see parallels in that general situation where my own family is concerned: these days we live in four separate states, up and down the east coast, but we do our best to stay close,” he said.

Scorchy Smith and The Art of Noel Sickles is already drawing rave reviews. If New Frontier and The Spirit writer-artist Darwyn Cooke’s affirmative murmurings upon seeing the single advance copy at Comic-Con International: San Diego last month could be translated into English, they might have had the best “blurb” ever, one observer said. American Flagg! creator Howard Chaykin held up a line of fans and autograph seekers so he could simply flip through the pages of the same copy.

Canwell, though, wanted to make sure that even the smallest detail didn’t get lost in the shuffle, and in this case that detail was the captions.

“Dean was responsible for 98% of the captions in the book, and they’re practically perfect. He knew exactly when to simply describe the illustration in question and when to add more information about it, when to point out its connections to other illustrations, when to toss in extra tidbits and factoids I couldn’t easily work into my article. Not many people stop to think about all the ways captions can benefit a book, but in Scorchy they’re an integral part of the whole, and I think they reflect the amount of thought and effort we put into all our books.”