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Pioneer Publications and its Odd Phantom Lady Comic, Up for Auction

Pioneer Publishing of London, Ontario, is a mysterious publisher who put out this unusual Phantom Lady #17 reprint in 1948.

Published Wed, 12 Mar 2025 20:27:07 -0500

by Mark Seifert

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The oddly-titled Avenger Crime Comic #25 was published by the equally obscure Canadian publisher Pioneer Publications of London, Ontario. Little is known about this company beyond the handful of comic books it published in 1948. There is some confusion between this company and the publisher Pioneer Publications, Inc., which had offices in London (England), Toronto, and New York and was a publisher of mid-1940s DIY and instructional books such as Diesel Hand Book: A Practical Book of Instruction and Practical Home Plans, but it seems unlikely that this is the same company.

Avenger Crime Comic #25 (1948) from Fox's Phantom Lady #17.

To this meager profile, we can add that Pioneer Publications of London, Ontario, almost published a comic book called Miracle Comics in 1945 and submitted a copyright for this title assigned to Emmett Kelleher of London, Ontario, as an unpublished literary work. It's unclear whether Kelleher is the creator of the comic in its entirety or is also connected to the publisher (for example, Bell Features' Cy Bell is sometimes listed on his own in connection to the copyright of Bell Features publications, depending on the circumstances). Given that WECA (War Exchange Conservation Act) had ended by this time and also given the existence of the earlier U.S. Hillman title of that name and Pioneer's later reprint strategy, it's also worth wondering if this too was meant to be a reprint title. That might make it more likely that Kelleher was the man behind the publisher.

Emmett Kelleher (1904-1966) had been a longtime newspaper reporter throughout Canada and operated his own news bureau in the 1930s. He became the London, Ontario correspondent for the Candian Press in 1939, and worked as a public relations officer for the Canadian Army during WWII. He was later a publicist for General Motors in Canada. In 1929, Kelleher made national headlines in both the U.S. and Canada with his reporting on the lost MacAlpine expedition, whose two planes had disappeared in the Arctic. The expedition survived with the help of a nearby Inuit camp. The next year, Kelleher again made headlines, this based on trapper Joe Labelle's tales of a "Village of the Dead," with claims that an entire Inuit village had been found abandoned. While the gist of the story was soon considered debunked a the time, one more recent author has connected some details of Kellerher's reporting of what Labelle observed with Captain Sir John Franklin's 1840s Artic exploration with the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

Regardless of the nature of Kelleher's relationship with Pioneer Publications of London, Ontario, it's little surprise that the company's late-1945 attempt at publishing a comic book in Canada didn't come about at that time. A shifting climate for publishers combined with continued difficulty in getting paper made comic book publishing difficult across the board. With FECA (the Foreign Exchange Conservation Act) underway in Canada beginning November 17, 1947, prohibiting the import of printed U.S. comic books but allowing the import of materials needed to reprint them, a number of publishers jumped into the comic book reprint business. Avenger Crime Comic #25 reprints Fox's Phantom Lady #17 (which is of course, one of the most in-demand comic books of the late Golden Age). The cover here is a reworking of the inside front cover of Phantom Lady #17, and the colorist of Avenger Crime Comic's cover apparently took their cues for Phantom Lady's costume from that inside front cover as well, which was printed using black and red ink entirely. There's an Apparent VG- copy of this unique little bit of history up for auction at the 2025 March 13 Canadian Golden Age Comics Showcase Auction #40290.