Casual Friday recently took an ugly turn when Batman showed up to stop a mugging wearing ratty sweatpants. Both the would-be mugger and his intended victim were unimpressed.
Check out this great fan film Arkham Journal, featuring my close personal friend James Levesque. OK, I've never met him, but my wife dated him in high school so that's gotta count for something, right? Oh, and it was filmed in Canada, too! Kinda an origin story for Hugo Strange.
Make way, Liberal cabinet: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will have another all-Canadian crew in his corner as he suits up for his latest feature role — comic book character. Trudeau will grace the variant cover of issue No. 5 of Marvel’s “Civil War II: Choosing Sides,” due out Aug. 31. Trudeau is depicted smiling, sitting relaxed in the boxing ring sporting a Maple Leaf-emblazoned tank, black shorts and red boxing gloves. Standing behind him are Puck, Sasquatch and Aurora, who are members of Canadian superhero squad Alpha Flight. In the left corner, Iron Man is seen with his arms crossed. “I didn’t want to do a stuffy cover — just like a suit and tie — put his likeness on the cover and call it a day,” said award-winning Toronto-based cartoonist Ramon Perez.
A Manitoba man spent the past two years building a replica of the 1966 Batmobile in his Batcave, err, workshop. The car will have its public debut this weekend at the World of Wheels car show in the RBC Convention Centre in Winnipeg. It all started when Rod Warkentin was 12 or 13 years old watching Adam West play Batman in the TV series."I always wanted to have that car. I thought the car was the coolest thing ever... Some 35, 40 years later, I got one," said Warkentin. Check out the link above for video of the car.
“Dixon of the Mounted” is one of numerous Canadian comic heroes who thrived during the Second World War.
Behold the raven-haired demi-goddess Nelvana, born of human woman and Koliak, god of the northern lights. With the power of light and heat, Nelvana battles the enemies of Canada’s north and, as alter-ego secret-agent Alana North, she protects us from the perils facing a country at war.
Arriving a few months before Wonder Woman, Nelvana was the first female comics superhero, and rode a wave of Canadian comics known as “Whites” (for their typically black and white interior pages).
Nelvana was born to protect our borders in 1941, in response to the War Exchange Conservation Act (WECA), prohibiting the import of luxury items, including comic books, from the United States. But Nelvana was not alone. Between 1941 and 1946, Canadian kids (and other comic enthusiasts) feasted on the adventures of Johnny Canuck, Canada Jack, Tang the Wonder Horse, Brok Windsor, Dixon of the Mounted and many more.
Now, thanks to a generous gift from an anonymous donor, 119 of these rare and extraordinary works are part of the collection of the Ryerson University Library Special Collections. “It’s the holy grail of Canadian comics,” says Ryerson professor Andrew O’Malley. O’Malley’s current project, “Comic Books, Children’s Culture, and the Crisis of Innocence, 1940-1954,” was awarded an Insight Development Grant by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Lost Heroes is the story of these forgotten Canadian comic book superheroes and their legendary creators. Recovering a forgotten part of our nation’s pop culture, Lost Heroes is the story of a national treasure that few of us have ever heard about. It’s the story of a small country striving to create its own heroes but finding itself constantly out-muscled by better-funded and better-marketed heroes from the media empire next door. It’s the story of Canada striving for more than seventy years to have its own band of national comic book superheroes, but constantly failing to keep them alive. The question is: why?
More of Canada’s First Superheroes to be reprinted starting with Johnny Canuck!
Toronto-based comic book historian, Rachel Richey is excited to announce that she has obtained the publication rights to characters of Golden Age publisher Bell Features. These Canadian wartime comics will be published as full collections starting with Johnny Canuck, Thunderfist, and Adrian Dingle’s The Penguin.
When pop-culture figures reach a certain level of success, many of them receive a little pomp and circumstance. Superman’s city of Metropolis is fictional, but that didn’t stop the good people of Metropolis, Ill. from erecting a five-metre-tall statue in his honour. Philadelphia has a statue of Rocky Balboa. And when the City of Detroit wouldn’t pony up for a full-size bronze of RoboCop, a group of concerned citizens decided to crowdfund the project.
It even happens here in Alberta. In the 1990s, the town of Vulcan famously leveraged its nominal (and, frankly, completely tenuous) connection to Star Trek and built a replica of the U.S.S. Enterprise near the entrance to town.
But it’s not like this province is lacking for homegrown characters who’ve actually made an impact on pop culture. On the contrary: one of the most popular superheroes ever is a proud Albertan who wears his nationality proudly on his sleeve—often literally, as his civilian outfit of choice involves a solid foundation of red flannel.
Here's a fantastically fun series of mugshots of Batman villains that were inspired by 1920s era criminal mugshots -- though the photos are dated in the '40s and '50s. They were created by Canadian artist Jason Mark, and he calls the series "The Usual Suspects."
Captain Canuck The hero of a self-titled indie comic launched in the mid-70s, Captain Canuck was originally imagined as a secret agent who gained powers after coming in contact with aliens, and patrolled the futuristic Canada of the 1990s, where our nation was the most powerful on Earth. Seems plausible. Could he beat Captain America? This hoser? Fat chance.
