A new Golden Age of Canadian comics?
Comic books may be an American medium, but it’s Canadians who are currently dominating the industry.
Nathan Fairbairn (’00 BA) was 10 years old when he first encountered the obsession that would eventually take over his every waking hour. In boxes full of dusty old comic books his uncle had read as a kid, he discovered the chronicles of Conan the Barbarian and The Avengers. By the time he was in junior high in the late ’80s, Fairbairn says, his love affair with comics was firmly entrenched.
“The reason I got my first jobs delivering papers and working at A&W was to buy comic books,” says Fairbairn, who is now one of the top colour artists in the industry, with credits on recent series featuring some of the most popular characters in comicdom, including Batman, Wonder Woman, Wolverine and the Guardians of the Galaxy. (His own comic series, Lake of Fire, came out in 2016–17.)
As it happens, the late ’80s were the perfect time to be a comics-obsessed kid in Canada. Two of the biggest stars of the era were creating a cultural ripple through an entire generation of comic fans, and both hailed from the Great White North.
When it comes to Canadian content in comics, few artists can claim the influence John Byrne has had. One of the top artists and writers of the ’70s and ’80s, Byrne became best known for his distinctive work on The Uncanny X-Men, during which he championed the inclusion of the now-iconic Canadian character Wolverine. He also created a team of super-Canucks called Alpha Flight, which was sponsored by the Pierre Trudeau government and made up of cultural-referent characters with names like Sasquatch, Shaman, Snowbird and Northstar. Byrne even went as far as showcasing West Edmonton Mall in a 1985 Alpha Flight storyline.
Meanwhile, Calgary-born Todd McFarlane was on his way to becoming a one-man industry. After rising to superstar status in the ’80s with indelible stylized renderings of Batman, the Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man, McFarlane went on to become a co-founder of Image Comics, which let creators keep the rights to their creations. McFarlane’s Spawn, based on a character he had been drawing since high school, debuted in 1992. The title spawned numerous spinoffs, a film adaptation and an action figure line that McFarlane parlayed into a toy company. McFarlane also ended up a co-owner of Fairbairn’s hometown hockey team, the Edmonton Oilers, creating the team’s third jersey.
“I was always aware that Byrne and McFarlane were Canadian, and that felt really cool. You felt like you existed in that world, you were represented in that world,” notes Fairbairn. “Just seeing people from your area do these dream jobs, there was a sense of pride, a sense that it’s possible. The biggest guy in comic books came from my hometown.”
Suzette Chan, a former Gateway editor-in-chief and an editor of the comics webzine Sequential Tart who also works in the U of A’s physics department, grew up reading comic books. When her family moved to Canada from Hong Kong in the late 1960s, she would have her father drive her around to corner stores and drug stores to pick up the pulpy, serialized titles she was most fond of. Although comics were her passion, she wasn’t conscious of Canadians working in the industry until an international superhero summit in 1979, courtesy of John Byrne.
“I read Byrne, of course, but I wouldn’t have known he was Canadian,“ she says. “But when the X-Men met Alpha Flight — that made the news.
“Before Byrne, Canadians were just melted into the [American] melting pot. He signals the emergence of a Canadian perspective.”
With Byrne putting Canada on the comics map, and McFarlane and others like Dave Sim acting as outspoken advocates for creators’ rights and self-publishing, the stage was set for a new wave of Canadian comic auteurs. That wave began rolling in with the turn of the millennium and is steadily gaining force as comic creators like Fairbairn emerge from across Canada. Cutting their teeth in art schools, video game companies or university student newspapers, they’re finding plenty of work with the big studios but are also producing independent work that reflects their country’s cultural diversity. Some of those works even hearken back to Canada’s comic-book past.
The Canadian Whites
When Nelvana of the Northern Lights burst onto the superhero scene in August of 1941, there was something different about her. It wasn’t that she was female: though she predated Wonder Woman by two months, she wasn’t the first woman superhero. And it wasn’t her powers: telepathy, invisibility, flight and an ability to project energy beams were hardly unique in the superhero pantheon. What was distinctive about Nelvana was that she was an Inuit demigoddess — which made her Canada’s first national female superhero.
A character of Nelvana’s heritage might never have broken through were it not for the Second World War. In the burgeoning golden age of comic books that had begun in the late ’30s, she was a contemporary of million-selling American stalwarts like Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel. But thanks to a wartime ban on U.S. imports including fiction periodicals, Canada found itself with a golden opportunity to create a golden age of its own — and Canadian artists seized it.
Along with Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman, and Hal Foster, creator of the comic strip Prince Valiant, artists such as Vernon Miller (creator of Iron Man, Canada’s first superhero — not to be confused with the Stan Lee character of the same name), Adrian Dingle (Nelvana’s creator) and George Menendez Rae became part of a wave of Canadian comic creators. But unlike Shuster and Foster, who headed south of the border to ply their trade, Miller, Dingle and Rae stayed in Canada. Working for publishers that sprang up in Toronto and Vancouver, they created heroes with such patriotic names as Johnny Canuck, Canada Jack, and Dixon of the Mounted. The comics they produced over the next five years were immensely popular, and would come to be known as “Canadian Whites” because of the black-and-white artwork within the colour covers.
With the end of the war and the loosening of the trade embargo, the returning tide of Stateside titles soon overwhelmed Canada’s homegrown market. It would be nearly three decades before Byrne, McFarlane and Sim would bring about the next wave of Canadian influence in the industry. There was one outlier, however: a comic book created by Richard Comely and Ron Leishman in the mid-’70s: Captain Canuck.
With a name that was distinctly Canadian — a red and white costume with a red maple leaf on both belt and mask — Captain Canuck was the answer to Marvel Comics’ Captain America. Comely and Leishman believed that Canada needed its own national superhero, and began publishing Captain Canuck on their own in 1975. Captain Canuck was the first successful Canadian comic since the Second World War, and despite its short run (the first volume ran for only three issues), the character has never really faded away. Now the property of the Canadian publisher Chapterhouse Comics, Captain Canuck again has his own comic-book series. This year, for Free Comic Book Day, an issue was co-written by Chapterhouse chief creative officer and Montreal-raised actor Jay Baruchel.
Chapterhouse has plans for its own universe of Canadian superheroes, which may ultimately include new takes on older heroes like Nelvana and Johnny Canuck. The latter’s 1942–46 run has already been published by Chapterhouse in compendium form, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign run by Toronto archivist and publisher Rachel Richey in 2014. That campaign followed on a previous campaign in 2013 by Richey and fellow comic lover Hope Nicholson to republish Nelvana of the Northern Lights. Both women have started their own publishing companies, and Nicholson is the consulting editor on Angel Catbird, a comic-book series from Canadian literary giant Margaret Atwood.
A Northern Invasion
Richey and Nicholson aren’t the only Canadian women making their mark in the industry. Artists such as Kate Beaton, Pia Guerra, Kate Leth, Faith Erin Hicks, Fiona Staples, and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki are some of the most popular artists working in mainstream and independent comics today. Diana Schutz, who spent 25 years as an editor at Dark Horse Comics and helped launch comics such as Sin City, Hellboy, Usagi Yojimbo and Groo, has long been a leader on the publishing side of the industry. Another alumnus, Patti LaBoucane-Benson (’90 BPE, ’01 MSc, ’09 PhD), won a 2016 Burt Award for First Nation, Inuit and Métis Literature for her graphic novel The Outside Circle. Along with male artists such as Chip Zdarsky, Michael Cho, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Stuart Immonen, Francis Manapul, Steve McNiven, Jeff Lemire and Fairbairn, Canadians make up a significant part of the current comic book landscape, and have the Eisner Awards to prove it.
Chan has spent a lot of time talking with and writing about Canadians in the industry. She attributes the growing Canadian presence in comics to an access and opportunity that only Canada can provide.
“We’re a wealthy country with public schools, affordable art schools and health care that can be a big bonus in a tough racket,” she says. “Plus, we have Canada Council grants that can be a great source of funding for independent publishers specializing in literary works, then expanding to comics. It all frees up the artists to create the art.”
Chan also cites the digitization of the industry, which has allowed comic creators like Fairbairn to work from anywhere, rather than relocating to the United States to work for industry powerhouses Marvel and DC.
“Jeff Lemire can do indie books from his Toronto studio. And Edmonton is a massive comics market that has produced people like Chip Zdarsky, Nathan Fairbairn, Jillian Tamaki and Sydney Padua. They have the option of working in the indie system or for the big publishers.”
Or, if they prefer a homegrown publisher, they can work for Drawn & Quarterly. Founded in 1989, the Montreal-based company has become what Chan calls “a huge watershed for the comics industry in Canada.” As the nation’s most successful publisher, D&Q publishes a wide variety of comic books, graphic novels and comic strips, and has been a major contributor to helping graphic novels make the jump from niche comic shops to mainstream bookstores. Among the Canadian luminaries it has published are Lynn Johnson (of For Better or Worse fame), Chester Brown (Ed the Happy Clown) and Seth (It’s a Good Life, if You Don’t Weaken).
In her courses, Gail de Vos, an author and instructor in the U of A’s School of Library and Information Studies, gives students a taste of the new breed of Canadian comic books, which she praises for their variety and for a distinctly Canadian feel that wasn’t as evident in the earlier generations.
“Jeff Lemire’s Essex County — it’s Eastern Canadian, that whole thing of small-town hockey and angst. For most of my students, there’s a familiarity there. I go from Lemire and his angular, rough type of illustrations to Fiona Staples, who does Saga. She’s bringing to life a wondrous world, doing amazing work sitting in Calgary.”
De Vos also praises Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer, about two preteen girls coming of age in Ontario’s lake country. (The comic was removed from school libraries in Minnesota and Florida last year after complaints from parents who thought it was meant for younger kids.) “It has a very Canadian feel; they use their Japanese-Canadian background in the artwork.”
The Canadian presence is something Fairbairn definitely feels from his vantage point within the industry.
“I do have conversations with other Canadians. I like having a shared background, seeing them in person, talking about being a Canadian in an American industry. I gravitate toward the Canadians at comic shows — and at every show, I invariably find Canadians. It’s not a small community. At one show, I was on a panel. There were six of us on the couch and four of us were Canadian.”
And though he says he doesn’t deliberately seek out Canadian collaborators, he’s worked with many of the biggest Canadian names in the business, including frequent collaborators Yanick Paquette and Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of the Scott Pilgrim series.
“One reason working on Scott Pilgrim was so great is that it was set in Canada. So many Canadian writers don’t want to set their stories in Canada. But it’s great seeing actual Toronto landmarks, seeing ourselves reflected. I angled hard for that job.”
Referencing those like Nicholson and Kalman Andrasofszky at Chapterhouse, who are working hard to re-establish Canadian characters and a comic-book industry within Canada, Fairbairn is enthusiastic. “Canadians don’t celebrate their own culture enough. We’re inundated with American culture, and I have a lot of respect for creators who try to make stuff that is specifically Canadian, who try to preserve stuff that is specifically Canadian, and who are working to bring back the characters that we’ve forgotten.”
The outlook may seem as bright as an optic blast, but Fairbairn is reluctant to call it a new golden age for Canadian comics. He notes that there is no Canadian equivalent to a publisher like Marvel, DC, Image or Dark Horse, at least not yet. But, he adds, “I do think you can say it’s a golden age of Canadian comic-book creators.”
De Vos agrees. Calling it a golden age “implies that it’s a thing of the past. It’s definitely a blooming age. I’m hoping that it’s just going to continue.”
For almost as long as there’s been a Canada, there’s been a University of Alberta. Over the next year, in honour of Canada’s 150th anniversary, we’re proudly celebrating the people, achievements and ideas that contributed to the making of a confederation.
