The first documented sighting of Captain Canuck in Prince George will happen Friday evening at CN Centre.
The first and most domestic of all Canadian superheroes will be in a special spotlight at Northern FanCon.
Yes, the nation has many popular comic characters who hail from the snowy north - Marvel's Wolverine, Deadpool and Alpha Flight, G.I. Joe character Back-Stop, while frontier cowboy Purple Rider and the Polka Dot Pirate turned pages in the comic book golden age, and we could even include Superman and Spawn and even Prince Valiant since their creators were Canadians (Joe Shuster, Todd McFarlane, and Hal Foster, respectively) - but no masked crime fighter of the cartoon universe has had more staying power while staying within Canadian storylines and settings than ol' Captain Canuck.
He first hit store shelves back in 1975. His career on the magazine rack has been intermittent but sustained in those small, lurchy measures. Large gaps of time would go by between editions, but they did keep coming out, and audiences did keep buying them.
It all began when artist/writer Richard Comely felt the nation needed its own distinctly Canadian hero the way the U.S.A. had Captain America. He convinced some friends and some funders to help out, and he got his pens and paintbrushes working. His earliest art partner on the project was Ron Leishman, who co-sparked the initial ideas.
Artists are sole-proprietor entrepreneurs at their core. In the age before internet, and the age before commercial-sized populations in Canada, the business side of creating Captain Canuck comics was difficult to maintain.
What was sustained, however, was the impression the character made on the kids of the country.
One of those devourers of comics was Fadi Hakim, six years old when he purchased the inaugural edition of Captain Canuck in July of 1975. He went on to become a business owner, a restaurateur, and when the time came to make a kids' menu for his Lakeview Diner in Toronto, his mind wrapped around that memory of his beloved childhood comicbook superhero.
Hakim tracked down Comely and asked if he could use the Captain Canuck image and logo on that menu for the kids. The conversation soon escalated.
"When Fadi approached Richard, he found out how Richard didn't have any future plans for the character. Captain Canuck was in one of those lull periods," said Tony White of Chapterhouse Comics, the new imprint company for the knight in red and white.
"Fadi thought it was a travesty to let Captain Canuck just sit there, dormant, and he couldn't get the ideas out of his head. He talked to some other people he knew, and it all just unfolded, with Richard on board. And Richard was not sold on this idea at first, so Fadi had to come with some solid ideas before Richard gave it all the green light."
There was, of course, much to be drawn to reboot the Captain Canuck franchise. Like the resurgence of the vinyl record for music fans, superhero consumers are still insistent on the comic book as the medium of choice. A lot of the original stuff was compiled and republished, and new material was invented.
However, the main catalyst for the rebirth of the character was as modern as these new times. It was a web series called Fool's Gold that unrolled short animated episodes on YouTube that sparked a global hunger for Captain Canuck.
White said the web series was a hit for three main reasons: good animation art, good plot, and great voices. People responded well to well regarded actors like Kris Holden-Ried in the title role, Paul Amos as nemesis Mister Gold, and Tatiana Maslany, Laura Vandervoort and others in the quality cast.
Holden-Ried and Amos will be on the panel at Northern FanCon on Friday to discuss the roles they played. Amos told The Citizen that he has played other iconic characters, but there is something particularly charming about this franchise, even if you aren't Canadian. He himself is Welsh, but enjoys the storyline of this adoptive nationalistic hero.
"Captain Canuck is more colloquial, more Canadian-based," than what most characters are, he said.
"The web series is not quite as prolific as the comic book because that's been around since the '70s but it's definitely coming around. I think once those grassroots are in place, they will get a lot of mileage. There has been a new incarnation of that, for the better, much more into the now, and it's getting out and about now."
That is the ultimate key to success, said White: don't live in the past. Captain Canuck storylines have to be innovative in their quests and moral tensions, and they have to be short in duration.
"There won't be a long-run Captain Canuck series," he said.
"Fans have shown us they prefer short-run series where there is a storyline that has some finality, something they are working towards, not a never-ending line that never builds to any closure. We want people to love the characters and enjoy the stories and not just like us for being a brand and locked into a title that isn't going anywhere. We want to earn your money, not just buy because you feel obligated."
A new set of comics is underway now, as is the slow rollout of the new web series entitled The Prometheus Protocol.
To find out more about the immediate future, the long-range plans and the colourful history of Captain Canuck, a substantial group of the current Chapterhouse team will be on stage during FanCon's opening night.
