Giant from Lake of the Woods | Forgotten Canadian superhero was the brainchild of Winnipeg artist
Only the elderly will be able to peer back through the mists of their own memories to the golden age of Canadian comics and newspaper illustrators to glimpse the image of Brok Windsor and the work of Jon Stables.
And while a handful of avid vintage comic book and farm magazine collectors might have fragile copies of the 1940s images of Windsor or the pulp fiction illustrations of Stables, both have almost entirely disappeared from Canadian consciousness.
However, if a Toronto vintage comic book historian and publisher succeeds in a current crowd-funding campaign, both the hero Windsor and the illustrator Stables will be resurrected and reintroduced to Canadians within months.
“It’s incredibly Canadian,” said Hope Nicholson, who is raising contributions through the crowd-funding company Kickstarter to fund a reprint of the Brok Windsor series that ran from 1944 to 1946 in Better Comics.
Brok Windsor was the product of a 1940 wartime government policy that blocked the import of U.S. comic books because they were “luxuries.” It created a pent-up demand for new comic books and comic book heroes, and a Canadian industry was born.
Windsor was literally a giant, having on a canoe trip come across a mystical land hidden in the Lake of the Woods area and becoming infected by something that made him become gigantic.
He had many monster-fighting adventures, often working with the island’s also-gigantic futuristic aboriginal people. Eventually he developed a love interest in Starra, a giantess.
Stables, the character’s creator and illustrator, was a Winnipegger who had emigrated from England as a child and spent years trying to become a professional artist.
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His first professional art work was for a Winnipeg department store before being hired by Country Guide magazine to illustrate the pulp fiction stories and serials that farming publications often carried in that era.
His Country Guide illustrations were widely admired, but when he moved to Vancouver after the outbreak of the Second World War to look for work as an illustrator for the war effort, he found no interest from those organizing posters and other forms of wartime propaganda. He worked in the Vancouver shipyards painting signs before going to Toronto to try to break into wartime illustrating.
He again found no takers, but was hired by Better Comics, one of the Canadian comic book companies created by demand arising from the ban on U.S comics.
He based Brok Windsor on a real life friend who owned a cottage in the Lake of the Woods area, and the feeling of that Canadian Shield area oozes from his art.
Nicholson fell in love with Stables’ artwork while working on other historical comic book projects and decided that if she wanted to see Brok stride proudly again, she’d better do it herself.
“I have been waiting years and years for someone to reprint these comic books so I could read them,” said Nicholson, who used to haunt archives looking at vintage Canadian comics on microfiche.
“It became clear that I was probably going to have to be the person who would have to get this started.”
Nicholson hopes to move the project into production in late September for release in mid-2015.
Bringing Windsor back to life will successfully combine her love of comic books, history and Canadian culture.
“That’s kind of what motivates me to do these projects: digging up material that people have never seen before, they don’t know about and hopefully they’ll be very interested in,” said Nicholson.
