This is one of the hardest messages I've had to write.
Yesterday I learned the terrible news that
John Nigel Cantwell (Phabox), one of my closest online friends had passed away after suffering a heart attack. He never gave any indication of poor health. We learned about it from a message on his Facebook page made by his girlfriend - Kerry.
"Hello all, This is Kerry, John Cantwells partner. Sadly I am writing as John passed away on Thursday 19th July"
Anyone who has been collecting GA scans very long should know his scanner name. I hope you'll read the following and get to know the man a little better. He was certainly a good friend to me.
I first got to know Phabox back in the early 2000s before GAC and DCM existed. He was a prolific sharer on the then popular Yahoo groups devoted to comics. In fact he started more than a dozen in his time. (I still run his
Fiction House group for him.) It was here we struck up a friendship that evolved into a creative partnership. Nigel, as I knew him best, was editor/writer on several archive collections he and I created together over the years. Many are hosted on DCM, some can't be due to non-PD content. Nigel's goal was to someday be a published writer and these were his outlets. He loved these old comics as much as anyone here, maybe more.
From a young age Nigel fell hard for comics. And when he saw our colour American books he was really in love but they were hard to come by. DC and Quality Comics were his favourites. Early on he tried to create a list of every superhero ever to appear. Not an easy job way off in England where he lived his whole life.
Years pass and he built up a modest collection of GA books always looking for a good deal. During that time he eventually became a postman in London. In later years when I got to know him he had changed jobs and was working with disabled children. Not an easy job but one he loved doing.
John had another love perhaps bigger than comics. He was crazy about cars. Classic cars were his calling and in his life he owned over 50! His proudest possession was pretty much a one of a kind.
A 1961 Ford Classic Estate Wagon (station wagon in America). Only 17 of these wagons were ever made as a special order for the Kenyan Police Force in Africa. Eventually one of them came back to the UK in 1964 and after a few other owners was bought in very sorry shape by Nigel in early 1993. He was now the owner of one of only three known in existence! I'll include a picture of Nigel and his prized wagon at the end of this. Nigel spent considerable time and effort on the car and was proud to show it at local car shows once he finally had it in better shape. He wrote his one and only professional article on the vehicle in the Nov/Dec 1993 issue of
Motoring Classics magazine. (You can read the article if you check the gallery link here -
http://imageshack.us/g/717/s1993cararticle3.jpg/)
Nigel loved to tell the story of when he bought a stack of comics for about $3 at a 'boot sale' (swap meet) that happened to include
Adventure Comics #40! A book he sold for enough to purchase his first computer! This was just after the turn of the century and he was looking for more info on comics. He would find many of the best sites going back then like
Golden Years and
Pure Excitement happily reading the stories they shared there. From there he found the Yahoo groups and eventually started his own little empire of groups. A lot of scans shared there are still being shared today on DCM. Just do a search for 'phabox' and see how many show up! He got to know many of the big scanners and I hope was well thought of by them all.
By the time GAC started up the Yahoo groups had lost their glow. Many moved on to other things. Nigel joined GAC and later DCM but was never as prolific there as he was on Yahoo. There was something special about the small groups devoted to specific publishers or themes that he ran. DCM and now CB+ are a catch-all for everything and we're sharing thousands of complete books at the touch of a button. Back in the days of Yahoo groups you really had to work to share a complete scan with their stupidly small storage limits. Nigel would share a comic across three or four groups making sure we had it all. And he made the hassle fun with his message about each story always telling us a little something about the characters or creators.
The last few years Nigel had become involved with his new lady, Kerry, and a new kitten he rescued and we saw a lot less of him. But he was still out there collecting scans and wishing me well on our insanely delayed
Phantom Lady V2 - Fox Years archive. The collection WILL be coming out later this year and will include a dedication to Nigel. The force behind it all. And a collection of scans contributed almost entirely by GAC and DCM members!
One of the last things Nigel shared with us, he was also very close with our own LoftyPilot and teto7totoro, were pictures from his visit to the famous Portmerion resort. Home for the 1967 cult classic UK TV series with Patrick McGoohan -
The Prisoner. It's from one of those pictures that I made the remembrance photo also include below. A full sized version of these will be added to his scans on the site. I think he looked like a very happy man in them. You can see more of them on his Facebook page here -
http://www.facebook.com/john.n.cantwell.7Some say online friendships are a pale version of a real friendship. That we've become more insular with all this technology. I can see that argument but if not for technology I'd have never met Nigel. He in the UK and I in Canada. And he'd have never gotten to share the comics he prized for so long nor read so many others shared by fans like him out there in cyberspace. So I thank technology for giving me such a good friend as Nigel. And I thank Nigel for being such a wonderful person to me and everyone else. I never got to meet him or talk with him on the phone but I know we were good friends and genuinely cared how each of us were doing. I was very happy for him and his new life with Kerry. She and his family have my deepest condolences.
I don't know how he went but I hope he wasn't in pain. And I hope he knew how much we appreciated him for not just his scans but his enthusiasm. You can see it in his introductions for our collections.
I'll miss you my dear friend. God bless.
-Yoc
If you are interested in reading any of our collections you can find some at the following links.
He and I were both most proud of
The Phantom Lady Archives v1 - The Quality Years.Some others include:
The Madam Zero Secret Files Collection_ver2The Miss America Quality Archiveand with other partners he helped make -
Pat Patriot Archive (Lev Gleason)
