Ken Steacy with the cancelled ‘Avro Arrow’
All photos courtesy Ken Steacy
If the Joe Shuster Award -winning comic book artist, graphic novelist, art director, editor and publisher, Ken Steacy ever retires (unlikely,) he could be a stand-up comedian!
I’m laughing so hard at his anecdotes and his faster than a speeding bullet storytelling as he jumps around his 50 -plus -year career, it’s hard to get my interview questions out.
Steacy’s ancestry could be a graphic novel: As an Air Force Brat who moved from Germany all over the world, his father, Lt. Colonel C.W Steacy was a fighter pilot who served in the RCAF/CAF during WWII and the Cold War. Two uncles on his mother’s side Clifford and Hubert Challis, were tail-gunners in Wellington bombers during the first thousand plane raid over Europe.
He was hooked on comics as a child mesmerized by illustrations of Rupert the Bear and The Adventures of Tintin, that his parents would read to him a bedtime. “When I was already drawing at eleven-years-old, I had this epiphany,” says the man who is still a boy at heart. “I read nothing but Marvel Comics and I thought, ‘wait a minute – my Dad is a fighter pilot, that’s a job and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby draw comics and that’s a job – so why not me?’” “Luckily I was blessed with parents who never tried to dissuade me from my path,” Steacy reminisces.
“In 1974, at the age of 19, I went to New York and banged on Stan Lee’s door at Marvel Comics and demanded a job. Now that’s chutzpah,” relates Steacy. “They offered me work as an inker of other people’s work but comics back then were an assembly line. I was a show-off and wanted to do it all so I went back to school at Sheridan College, where by coincidence, I met my wonderful wife Joan and we’ve been together ever since.”
“You know, comics in the late ‘50s and ‘60s were dumb. It was Stan Lee who said “‘lets make Spiderman have problems and flaws like he can’t get a date.’”
Steacy has chronicled the exploits of Astro Boy, Iron Man, Star Wars, Harry Potter and many more. He also collaborated on a graphic novel with Margaret Atwood, entitled WAR BEARS, that has been optioned as a series. After moving from Toronto to Victoria, he and his wife Joan, an award-winning visual story-teller in her own right, created and taught the Comics & Graphic Novels programme at Camosun College.
I asked Steacy how he came to create the posters for VIJFF? “When Joan & I came to Victoria, we just couldn’t find a decent deli. Someone said to go to the JCC because they have fantastic blintzes. There we met friends who told me about the Victoria International Jewish Film Festival and said they need a new poster. Since then I think I’ve done nine.”
Victoria will have a chance to meet Ken Steacy in person on Sunday, September 27th at 2:00 pm at the JCC Blintz Bash when he will be speaking and signing his VIJFF posters and probably eating blintzes! For ticket reservations: https://blintzbash2026.eventive.org/welcome
