Updated 2025
Hello, it’s your Editor here! This site is now six years old, and in case you have stumbled here, or you have been following for a while, you might be wondering, why is he doing this?
I started off reading old Greg Clark stories that were published in the late 1970s by Totem in extra-cheap paperback form. (And I mean cheap. These were printed on newsprint quality paper that had already yellowed and acquired a musty smell in the 1980s). These were reprints of the hardcover books published mainly in the 1960s, of his stories after Jim Frise died.
While strolling through The World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto in the early 1980s, I came across the reprints of the Greg-Jim stories by Collins Press.
Since I enjoyed these as well, I set out to find all of the Greg Clark and Jimmie Frise books I could find. In the pre-Internet days, this was not so easy, but I ended up with most of them. With the ease of finding used books on the Internet, my collection was complete by about 2005, with the tracking down of the two books they published in the 1930s.
Knowing that their careers spanned decades, I knew there was just so much that was never collected. But how to read the old stories? Paper copies exist at the Toronto Reference Library in their archives, but that would be impractical since I live in Ottawa and would require special appointments (however access to the original colour illustrations would be nice). Microfilm was the best bet at the time, so I did some preliminary research in 2008 while in Toronto. Greg and Jim’s primary publishing location was the Toronto Star Weekly, which is catalogued separately from the much more popular and readily available Toronto Star. Personal reasons meant that the initial practical research for me did not begin until 2015. This required making special requests to Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Canada (where I live), and travelling to their location. About once a month, I would make the trip, and spend a day scanning what I could find. Depending on the material, I could do anywhere from 6 months to a year’s worth of content in a day. This work was mostly completed by 2018. I decided that in order to read all of the stories I would have to transcribe them, and I figured setting up this site with a regular publishing schedule will force me to do it. Since they both became employees of the Toronto Star Weekly after World War One in 1919, I felt that starting the site in 2019, 100 years later, would be a fitting tribute.
I would like to thank all of those who comment and write to me about their memories. I appreciate hearing from the relatives of Greg and Jim, and from people who have original artwork or other memorabilia related to the pair. Feel free to reach out to info@gregandjim.ca if you would like to get in touch for any reason.