Marking Captain Canuck’s 50th anniversary, the series creator is stopping by Vancouver Island for free signing sessions and to speak to fans of the superhero comics.<\/p>\n
Richard Comely was at Curious Comics in Nanaimo on Wednesday Nov. 26, and the store’s Langford location on Friday, Nov. 28.<\/p>\n
Captain Canuck was created in the 1970s by Comely and Ron Leishman, who wanted to make a patriotic Canadian superhero. Captain Canuck, also known as Tom Evans, is a former RCMP officer who was exposed to alien experimentation while on a Scouts camping trip, giving him superpowers which he uses on missions for the Canadian International Security Organization.<\/p>\n
“I met Ron Leishman in 1971 in church,” Comely said. “I call him the co-creator, he actually didn’t do any work on the comic, didn’t do any writing or any art, but if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have done it … We would get together, and the first thing he said to me is, ‘There should be a Canadian superhero, why don’t we have our own?’”<\/p>\n
As the years passed, these ideas turned to ink on a page, and Captain Canuck was born. His name would go on to be associated with Canadian identity, and in 1995 a postage stamp was made in the character’s honour. In 2018 the Royal Canadian Mint released a Captain Canuck $20 silver coin that sold out the day of release.<\/p>\n
“When I was first creating the character way back in late ‘74 it was kind of constructing something with a recipe. I knew I wanted certain characteristics and I wanted certain facets of his character, like I wanted him to have some Aboriginal blood in his veins … and the traits I wanted him to have we would consider typical, maybe ideal, characteristics like politeness – we’re overly polite – less violent, less prone to use firearms. All of that goes into the character.”<\/p>\n
This past winter, Comely published a cover featuring the captain giving U.S. President Donald Trump a scolding, with an empty speech bubble allowing fans to decide what they wanted the superhero to say. <\/p>\n
“A lot of Canadians look to Captain Canuck as a symbol in this situation with the States … He’s not being super violent here, he’s being Canadian, but sternly Canadian,” Comely said. “The story literally went around the world about this cover, my aunt in England saw it on the BBC and I got a phone call from Australia, but something that a lot of people aren’t aware of is that 80 per cent of our sales of Captain Canuck are in the United States.”<\/p>\n
Despite the number of American fans, Comely said he never received any pushback from south of the border, and soon afterward, he created a limited-edition poster of Captain Canuck holding Trump by his collar in one hand, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, in the other. At the time, Musk was a close confidant of the American president, but the relationship was short-lived and now Comely said the picture can be interpreted as the hero pulling the two apart, “like, ‘OK you guys, cut it out.’”<\/p>\n
When No Kings protests began against Trump, Comely said protesters in Californians reached out to him for permission to use the image on placards, which he granted.<\/p>\n
“One of the signs said ‘Hands off Canada’ and that was in a big demonstration in California,” he said. “Even Americans were looking at Captain Canuck as symbolic.”<\/p>\n
Comely’s book The Captain And I<\/em>, covering the history of Captain Canuck, is set to be released next summer, along with a collaboration with the gang from Archie Comics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Richard Comely’s superhero, created in the 1970s, seeing resurgence in popularity <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":160918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-regional-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n