The Beginnings of Captain Canuck
By Richard Comely, co-creator of Captain Canuck
In 1975 I was living with Henry, my fiancée’s brother in Winnipeg, Manitoba and I rented small office space on the 2nd floor of 1854 Portage Avenue. I was working overtime to prepare the first issue for the printer.
Just as this is my first blog ever, Captain Canuck was my first attempt to produce and publish a comic book. In many respects it was like reinventing the wheel. I was experimenting with colouring methods with help from someone who worked for one of the main engravers in Winnipeg. That would be Dick Thomas.
About seven years later Dick started Digital Chameleon and utilized the amazing talents of George Freeman. But first George came to work with me. Starting with issue #4 George produced most of the pencil art for the original CC series.
Digital Chameleon began in the early 1980’s when colouring comic art with computers was very new. For a good while, Winnipeg based Digital Chameleon coloured the bulk of DC and Marvel comic titles. Back in 1975 colour for comic book art was created with photo masks. The colour pallet was very limited. Anyone who’s looked through comics books from that era knows what I mean.
With a lot of help from Dick Thomas I came up with a colouring method that changed all that.
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I did the black line art as per usual then placed clear acetate over the line art. Using animator’s paint (vinyl acrylic copolymer) I painted the colours on the acetate. The acetate overlay was colour separated using a process stat camera. The yellow, cyan blue and magenta negatives came from the overlay. The black negative was made by shooting a line negative of the black line art. Full colour process printing requires four colour plates; cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). I have drawn since early childhood. In my teens, I worked part time for three sign shops. This was long before computer cut vinyl lettering. Signs then were all hand lettered. |
I received a proper sign painting brush for my twelfth birthday and taught myself how to hand letter.
Shortly after I finished high school and just before turning 18, I started working as a crest designer for Jaydee Products. Both the company and the eight storey building in which Jaydee was located, no longer exist.
Producing the first issue of Captain Canuck was a big undertaking for me. I had no experience and I didn’t know anyone who did. Five or six weeks after I married my angel wife (Evelyn) on March 4, 1975 the first edition of Captain Canuck went to press. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but would learn later that Captain Canuck was the world’s first and only independently published full colour comic book series.
The print run was 200,000 copies.
Soon George Freeman and Claude St. Aubin would join me. Both of them were a Godsend. More on that in my next instalment.
