Defending the north
From Deadpool to Snowguard, superheroes are slowly starting to get more Canadian
RAJU MUDHAR We’ve got your back, Wolverine.
Thanks to the number of high-profile Canadian comic-book creators, the world of superheroes has been slowly getting more Canadian.
In recent years, we have seen the reboot of Captain Canuck, the Justice League relocated here, the brief reappearance of Alpha Flight and even a superhero-guest-laden same-sex wedding featuring Northstar, a French-Canadian super speedster.
The newest flag-waving hero is Snowguard, a member of The Champions, a group of younger heroes in the Marvel Universe. She’s the creation of Jim Zub (né Zubkavich), a prolific Torontobased writer and artist who’s the latest to get the chance to fold some Canadiana into his work.
“I jokingly call it my maple-syrup agenda,” says Zub. “As far as I knew there wasn’t a teenage Canadian hero in the Marvel Universe. I used that as springboard in the same way that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee used Norse mythology as the broad basis for a hero in Thor. What if we did that with Inuk spirituality and myth as the sources of a superhero?”
The result is Amka Aliyak, alias Snowguard, a character powered by an Inuit spirit/force called “Sila,” which lets her shape-shift and take on animal traits. Zub say he consulted with Nyla Innuksuk, an Inuk filmmaker who grew up in Igloolik and Iqaluit and founded Mixtape VR in Toronto, to make the character accurately represent that world.
As for Snowguard’s larger story, her reason for being — like Spider-Man’s “with great power comes great responsibility” — the idea is one that many Canadians could easily identify with.
“In talking to Nyla, we started about bigger, broader things, about being in the North and being Indigenous, and trying to find the balance between tradition and modern living. That’s the theme,” he says.
“How many people are of multiple cultures and trying to hold onto their ethnic or traditional past while trying to move into the future and trying to be their own person? And what if we do that, like all superhero stories, in a bigger symbolic way?”
Snowguard is the latest to join the ranks of Canadian superheroes.
Wolverine was always the X-Men rogue who would snort “I’m Canadian, bub!” when anyone dared call him American.
Then there’s Deadpool, who somewhere along his rise to great popularity also became Canadian, which has been exploited to great effect, thanks to his portrayal in three movies by Vancouver’s Ryan Reynolds (with Canada providing fodder for at least two great bits in Deadpool 2.)
Funnily enough, both of those characters were created by Americans.
Canadian superheroes’ first heyday came during the Second World War, when homegrown heroes like Johnny Canuck momentarily flourished. Some of those characters are being revived by Torontobased Chapterhouse Comics, whose own maple-syrup agenda has seen it resurrect Captain Canuck and other heroes from what’s referred to as comics’ golden age.
But for many Canadian fans, the fondest memories are from the ’80s, usually involving Alpha Flight, the federal government superteam that first appeared in the pages of The Uncanny X-Men — originally to repatriate Wolverine to his native land. Alpha Flight eventually got its own series, written and drawn by John Byrne, a Britishborn creator (now a comics legend) raised in Canada. But according an interview he did at the launch, it wasn’t this country’s fans who were clamouring for more of the Canadian heroes.
“There has not been a great deal of response to Alpha Flight in Canada, as far as letters or reactions at conventions. The major positive response has been in the United States, which is what I think inspires us to give them their own book. If it were going to be a smash hit only in Canada, it wouldn’t be worth it. I think the group’s real popularity lies with American fans, possibly because they are slightly exotic, being Canadian,” said Byrne in a Marvel Comics promotional magazine from 1983. Byrne was one of the first modern Canadian comics superstars, but he’s not alone. Of course, Joe Shuster co-created Superman, and based the Daily Planet in part on being a copyboy at the Toronto Star. In the 1990s, Alberta’s Todd MacFarlane rode his fame with SpiderMan into creating Spawn and Image Comics, which started the move back toward creatorowned comics. The rise of web comics and independent comics — probably best shown by how huge Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Toronto-set Scott Pilgrim was — also helped inspire this wave of Canadian comics creators who now move between their own creations and working for Marvel and DC.
Byrne’s run on the series lasted 28 issues and featured a number of fairly clichéd Canadian characters: Guardian, a.k.a. Vindicator, who wore a superpowered suit and the flag; Sasquatch, a physicist who transformed, Hulk-like, into a Bigfoot; Northstar and Aurora, francophone sibling superspeedsters; the acrobatic and cursed Puck and many more. Secondary characters formed Beta and Gamma Flight, all of them part of a government bureaucracy, which underscored how they differed from U.S. counterparts.
Zub cites Canadian values “that say we can do heroic things within the rules. What are Canadian core values? Helping each other, compromise and being part of a bigger thing … American superheroes are these independent spirits and our Canadian heroes are, ‘Hey, can’t we all get along?’ ”
Sadly for Canadian patriots, after Byrne left, subsequent cre- ative teams couldn’t make a hit of Alpha Flight. The book was cancelled and the characters subjected to all sorts of weirdness in their sporadic appearances. Along the way, just as Pierre Trudeau made an appearance in the first issue of Alpha Flight, his son Justin appeared on a cover of a 2016 comic, written by Canada’s Chip Zdarsky and drawn by Ramon Perez, a well-known Toronto artist who also helps run the Royal Academy of Illustration & Design, alias RAID. The multimedia artists’ collective has included comic artists Cameron Stewart, Marcus To and Francis Manapul. “There is a great hub of creators here,” Perez says, noting Chapterhouse’s rise, “but everything pales in the shadow of Marvel and DC.” Jeff Lemire, the award-winning creator of The Essex County Trilogy and Roughneck, has one foot in that world, moving between superhero comics and his own independent creations. Currently, he’s mostly working on the latter, and also recently brought Mark Millar’s Hit-Girl to Canada for an ongoing arc. But when he was writing DC’s Justice League in 2013, he moved the team northward and got to create his own Canadian characters. DC has always had fewer Canadian heroes than Marvel, but Lemire took his shot. “This is like my ultimate dream job. It sounds like a joke and something like this would never happen, but it is actually happening, and I couldn’t be happier,” Lemire told the Star at the time. Lemire created Equinox, a Cree superhero whose powers depended on the season. He also made an existing character, Adam Strange, Canadian. Strange joined Booster Gold, who in 2011 was also given Canadian citizenship, in a Justice League story arc. Continuity in comics is a fluid thing; new creative teams or the publishers themselves decide to change something in a character’s backstory and it is held that it was ever thus. Fans call this a “retcon,” short for “retroactive continuity.” Strange and Gold were retCanConned — retroactively Canadianized — but their citizenship doesn’t appear to have been retained. When we contacted DC to determine whether those characters were still Canadian, a spokesperson responded: “In current comics continuity, it’s not confirmed that Booster Gold or Adam Strange are citizens of Canada. In 2016, DC launched a linewide publishing event, Rebirth, that changed some elements of continuity from earlier DC continuity. In other words, it’s been a while since any mention has been made of either character as Canadian citizens, and it’s not clear at this point if they are.”
Ah, but an old stalwart is back: the first issue of The Return of Wolverine hits comics stores in September, the culmination of a years-long arc that saw the character return to the Marvel Universe after being dead (sort of, but not really. This is comics, after all) for years. Meanwhile, the local scene is a busy one: For anybody who wants to check out older Canadian heroes, there is an exhibit on at the Toronto Reference Library called Alter Ego: Comics and Canadian Identity, which runs until July 29, created by Library and Archives Canada. This weekend, there will be hero-based virtual reality demos showcased as part of it.
RAID Studio is moving into a new space in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood and one of the big additions is going to be a gallery, where Perez says they plan to put on shows of their own work and other art. As well, the massive Fan Expo event once again descends on Toronto during the last week in August and, this year, John Byrne will be one of the big-name comic guests meeting fans and signing autographs. And that’s where he’ll learn whether there are Canadian Alpha Flight fans out there after all.
“We can do heroic things within the rules. What are Canadian core values?” JIM ZUB TORONTO-BASED WRITER