Excerpt from my tribute, “The Creative Works of Joe Wehrle, Jr.” from The Digest Enthusiast No. 8, June 2018:
“In 1989, my wife Karen and I came up with the idea of producing a monthly Cartoon Trader, which would focus on the buying and selling of newspaper comic strips, the way the Comics Buyer’s Guide mainly concerns itself with comic books. Unfortunately, we were never able to get enough ads to make it a really substantial-looking monthly or to make it the self-supporting venture we’d hoped for, so we had to discontinue it after just a few issues. We did create several continuing features for the magazine, though—classic cartoonist trading cards, retrospectives, paper dolls (Trina Robbins sent us some outfits!) and a monthly page of original comic strips.”
Today, Cartoon Trader’s ads offer only a passing glance at yesterday’s prices, but Joe and Karen loaded each Trader with such charming original content it’s still fun to read today.
Joe’s bibliography appears on the Larque Press website.
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