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Monday, April 9, 2012

Mountie Madness part 1

When you take some time to research Canadian comic book characters from the 40's, you quickly come to realise that you can't swing a dead beaver without hitting a mountie.

What is somewhat surprising is that some of the most prominent characters were created by non-Canadians.  One in particular, (Dave) King of the Royal Mounted, first saw the light of day in 1935 as a weekly newspaper strip.  He is the creation of New York'er Stephen Slesinger.  King went on to appear in daily strips, books and movies and had a number of comics published by Dell, the final issue of which came out in 1958.

I've been able to locate and download most of the issues (I believe there are 28 in total).  Those that I've read to this point contain murder mystery stories.  Throughout, King is helped by a kid named...huh...Kid, whom I suspect is deliberately left a relatively blank slate so that the reader can visualize himself in the story in his place.

Dave King was not a superhero but then, neither was Johnny Canuck.  So as a change of pace, from time to time such characters will be given their little spotlight here as an acknowledgement of their place in Canadian comic history (or at least, that of Canadian characters).

2 comments:

  1. I was just wondering, I came from SouthAmerica and I remember that around 1955-1960 there was a comic called Captain Canuck, which was a mountie, could that be the same King of the Royal Mounted, or Sergent Preston?

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    1. Hi there,

      There's a chance. I've come across at least one character whose name was changed when his stories were published in another country. However, there were quite a few mountie adventurer types during that time so it's hard to know which one it might have been in your case.

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