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"CANADA FINALLY HAS HER OWN HONEST-TO-GOODNESS COMIC MAGAZINE, with Canada's very own superhero-Captain Canuck!" (C.C. 1).1 Captain Canuck's, 1975 release was the first Canadian comic book success since the collapse of the Second World War comic book industry. Captain Canuck, clad in a reel and white suit and maple leaf emblems, used his strength-derived from a healthy diet and fitness-to fight for Canadian "peace, order, and good government." He avoided violence when possible, prayed before missions, and dedicated himself to protecting Canada and the world from evildoers. Canadian readers enjoyed the familiarity of national images, symbols, and locations infused with the action-adventure format established by American comic books. Yet, despite its popularity, the comic collapsed several times due to the economics of publishing in Canada and the problem of American cultural "dumping."
Captain Canuck is more than a comic book relic, however; it is a cultural artifact, a key item in the construction of modern Canadian cultural identity and consciousness. While in print, the comic presented popular cultural characteristics, myths, symbols, and stereotypes that legitimized the national identity and reinforced the conception of Canada as a "peaceable kingdom." Following the comic's publication run, Captain Canuck was revived by the Canadian government and incorporated as a national icon valuable for fostering national awareness and pride. It is an example of perpetual nationbuilding, an item of popular culture presenting national signifiers that, following its demise, was resurrected and recycled into a national signifier itself; it was fostered in a period of nationalism, empowered the national identity, and later was integrated into the national mythsymbol roster.
"Nationalism," according to Ernest Gellner, "is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist" (169). Benedict Anderson has furthered this idea, arguing that nations are imagined into existence because "the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (6). Comic books, as a visual medium, engage this act of imagination, in turn facilitating the mental construction of the nation and national identity. It is an act that may be an essential part of being Canadian. Canadian cultural historian Daniel Francis has...