Four people, from four different worlds, who found themselves making the same thing in the same city at the same moment.
Born Halloween 1892, in Pictou, Nova Scotia. His 1938 poetry collection By Stubborn Stars won the Governor General's Award. His magazine, the Protestant Digest, reached 50,000 subscribers with advisers including Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. By 1949 he was on a Life Magazine list of Communist sympathizers alongside Einstein, Bernstein, Arthur Miller, Chaplin, and Langston Hughes. He returned to Nova Scotia and kept writing until 1972.
Elmer Cecil Stoner was born October 20, 1897, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on scholarship and is considered the first African-American artist to draw mainstream American comic books — his work appeared in the debut issue of Detective Comics in 1937. His widow later listed, among his achievements, the creation of Mr. Peanut.
Joe Kubert was born September 18, 1926, in Poland. His family arrived in America when he was an infant. He began drawing comics professionally at approximately eleven years old. He became one of the defining artists in American comics — Hawkman, Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace, Tarzan, Viking Prince. He founded the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in Dover, NJ in 1976.
One of three Nova Scotians who helped Kenneth Leslie found the Protestant Digest. As editor of The Challenger, Richardson assembled the creative team and oversaw production. He was the operational spine of a project whose publisher was primarily a poet and activist.