50 years after he first hit newsstands, Captain Canuck is ready for a comeback
Co-creator Richard Comely says Canada needs to be more self-sufficient in everything, including pop culture
Captain Canuck, Canada's homemade superhero, has been around for 50 years, and shown up in many different mediums: comics books, comic strips, a stamp, a web series that features the voice of Tatiana Maslany and music by Platinum Blonde. He's also had a lot of starts and stops, with the character going dark for years at a time. But now, a half-century after his creation, Captain Canuck feels more relevant than ever.
Richard Comely first came up with the idea for Captain Canuck back in the early 1970s, while working at a Manitoba sign shop alongside co-creator Ron Leishman.
"He's the one who said to me, there should be a Canadian superhero," Comely says.
The pair mused about it for a couple years, but never really managed to get the idea off the ground.
"Life got in the way for a while," says Comely.
Eventually, Comely started seriously looking into what it would take to make Captain Canuck a reality. In 1974, he set up his own comic imprint, Comely Comics, and started work on the first issue, which hit newsstands in April of 1975.
Comely says that it makes sense for Canada to have its own superhero. After all, the very concept of modern superheroes was invented by a Canadian.
"The first real superhero, the beginning of the genre of Superman is Superman, right?" he says. "It was Joe Shuster and his cousin [Jerry Siegel] who created Superman."
More than that, though, Comely says that what he calls "nationalistic" superheroes — Captain America, Captain Britain, Captain Canuck — tell us a lot about how we see ourselves as a country. Captain Canuck, a.k.a. Tom Evans, is a former RCMP officer who develops superpowers — strength, speed, endurance — after an alien encounter. He's also canonically bilingual.
"They're sort of the idealized interpretation of what we would envision [ourselves] to be like," he says. "So for Canada, he's polite. He's more of a peacemaker and less prone to violence. He's not as loud and flamboyant."
He adds that the idea of the superhero as idealized citizen probably dates back to Greek mythology.
"Atlas. Zeus, all those guys… to the ancient Greeks those guys were representational of the ideal man," he says.
The most recent version of Captain Canuck started publishing in 2015, after Comely licensed the character to Chapterhouse Books. At a time when issues of Canadian cultural identity and the question of "what makes us Canadian?" are front and centre in the wake of American tariff and annexation threats, Captain Canuck feels like a superhero for the moment.
Over the years, the Captain has defended Canada from Cold War spies, organized crime bosses, and alien invaders. Now, Comely says, there's a new interest in the hero thanks to the recent talk from the U.S. about annexing the country and the subsequent swell of "elbows up" patriotism. At March's Toronto Comicon, a hot seller at Comely's table was a special edition cover with the Captain getting in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump. Comely is quick to point out that the confrontation between Captain Canuck and Trump isn't actually physical.
"He's basically lecturing him," he says. "He's not punching him. He's not throwing him down on the ground and stomping on him or anything like that."
More broadly, Comely hopes that this new wave of Canadian patriotism will spark a new level of self-sufficiency in Canada, including a focus on building our own popular culture.
"We've got to be more self-sufficient," he says. "We've got to be more independent. In all aspects of production, whether it be food or automobiles or pop culture, too. We've been fed American media for decades and decades and decades, and we measure everything by their standards… for a Canadian writer or actor, what success is is going down to the States and working. That attitude has got to change."
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