Where The Challenger came from, who made it, and why it disappeared — then resurfaced.
A Nova Scotia poet who won a prize for his writing and decided that wasn't enough. A comic book industry building something extraordinary while nobody was paying attention. And four issues of a ten-cent magazine that said everything that needed saying.
The story starts in 1892, in Pictou, Nova Scotia, with a boy named Kenneth Leslie. His father was a shipping magnate and a Quebec legislator who drowned in 1905 when his ship went down in a storm. Kenneth was thirteen. He attended Dalhousie University at fourteen and eventually earned a graduate degree in Nebraska, spent time in France, and tried preaching, radio, acting, and music before settling on the thing he was actually best at: making people pay attention.
In 1938, his poetry collection By Stubborn Stars won the Governor General's Award — Canada's highest literary prize. That same year, he launched the Protestant Digest, a progressive journal of religion and politics, with $40,000 invested by his wife and three colleagues from Nova Scotia. Its editorial advisers included Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. At its peak, the magazine reached 50,000 subscribers.
Leslie was alarmed by what he saw spreading through American life in the 1930s. In 1943 he established a Textbook Commission to remove antisemitic language from American school textbooks. And in 1944, he had a different kind of idea: Comics.
By the mid-1940s, American comic books were selling roughly a billion copies a year. More children read them than read newspapers. They cost a dime and they were everywhere. If you wanted to reach people who weren't already on your side, you went where they were. And so in 1944 Leslie launched The Challenger — a full-color comic book published under the banner of the Interfaith Committee of Protestant Digest, sold on newsstands for ten cents.
The 1945 edition had a press run of 400,000 copies. Its cover showed young people of different backgrounds standing together against figures labeled Fear, Hate, and Greed. Inside were stories written and drawn by people who meant every word.
Four issues. Then the world shifted, the politics moved, and Leslie's enemies caught up with him. By 1949, he was on a Life Magazine list of suspected Communist sympathizers — named alongside Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Miller, Charlie Chaplin, and Langston Hughes. He returned to Canada. The Protestant Digest closed in 1953. He died in 1974 in a Halifax nursing home. About twelve people attended the funeral.
The four issues of The Challenger still exist. Two can be read free online right now. The Challenger Club is working on the other two.
"He had become increasingly disturbed by the growth of fascist and antisemitic attitudes in the United States throughout the Thirties — and used his publishing platform in an attempt to counter such trends."
— Burris Devanney, biographer of Kenneth Leslie
In the mid-1940s, comic books were selling roughly a billion copies a year in the United States. Studies suggested most children between 8 and 14 read them regularly. They cost a dime. They were on every newsstand. Leslie understood that reaching people who weren't already persuaded meant going where they already were.
The back covers of Issues #3 and #4 carried a pledge and an invitation to form local "Challenger Club" chapters — readers could send away to join and organize in their communities. The modern Challenger Club picks up that name: optional, open, and self-organized.
All four issues of The Challenger are in the public domain under US copyright law. They belong to everyone. That is the foundation of this archive: restore what was lost, make it free, and trust the reader.
