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For those who don’t know, this Friday is Canada Day, the day
America’s lovable northern neighbors celebrate their nation’s founding. I’ve elected to celebrate this most
auspicious holiday early with a look at the various superheroes of Canada that
have come out of Marvel Comics.
I’m focusing solely on Marvel for this guide because there really aren’t
any Canadian superheroes in the DC roster.
If they do exist, and I’m not sure they do, they haven’t
been represented in any of the major international superhero groups like the
Global Guardians or Batman Inc., which most likely means they’re a one-off
character like Louisiana’s “King Billy” superhero. Marvel, on the other hand, has an entire team of Canadian
heroes with a vast and expanding roster.
So let’s take a look at proud protectors to the North with your guide to
Canadian superheroes.
WOLVERINE
We open with the biggest name on the list; Wolverine. Most folks probably still aren’t aware
Wolverine is from Canada, even though it popped up in X-Men Origins: Wolverine but that movie was also terrible so it
makes sense.
But yeah, Wolverine
is a proud son of Canada going all the way back to his earliest inception in
the pages of the Hulk. In his
first appearance, Wolverine was acting as an operative of the Canadian
government trying to stop the Hulk after the gamma giant wandered into Canada
for unaccountable reasons. That
Canadianness is actually the whole reason anyone know Wolverine at all believe
it or not.
See, in 1975 when Chris
Clairemont rebooted the X-Men franchise he decided the new team would be
internationally themed, with the members representing various nations of the
world like Russia, Japan, and Kenya.
So, when Clairemont wanted a representative of Canada he decided to
scoop up Wolverine and the rest is history.
This even tied into the first iteration of Wolverine’s
origin story, that he was a special weapons project created by the Canadian
Department H and intended to lead their government superhero team Alpha
Flight. Obviously that didn’t
happen but that doesn’t mean Alpha Flight never had a leader.
GUARDIAN/VINDICATOR
This is a double entry given that these characters are so
inter-connected there’s really not much to say about one without the
other. Guardian was a brilliant
Canadian scientist working closely with the Alpha Flight project to develop
Canada’s answer to the Iron Man armor.
His solution was a lot more elegant than Tony Stark’s, creating a kind
of fabric circuitry that could be warn like a costume while also giving the
wearer super strength, flight, and a force field. With Wolverine refusing to join the team, Guardian stepped
up, painted his costume with the Canadian flag, and became team leader.
Eventually, Guardian was killed by the team’s archenemies
Omega Flight (a group of failed government superheroes now bitter and out for
revenge.) In the wake of his
death, his wife dawned her own costume and took the name Vindicator, seeking
vengeance for her husband’s death.
She led the team for a time before she and most of the original Alpha
Flight members drifted away. Most
recently (IE 2011) the entire original team were brought back and reformed
under Guardian to combat a new evil lurking within the Canadian government. That evil turned out to be Vindicator,
driven mad by the loss of her daughter and joining forces with some of Alpha
Flight’s greatest enemies.
SASQUATCH
In case Guardian’s set-up wasn’t clear enough, he’s
essentially a blend of Captain America and Iron Man but painted up in Canadian
colors and mythos. That’s the case
with a lot of Alpha Flight team members and none more so than Sasquatch. Sasquatch is essentially the Canadian
Hulk with a design aesthetic going all the way back to that Wolverine origin
issue I mentioned. See, aside from
Wolverine and Hulk there was a third creature in that mix: the Wendigo.
However, unlike on Hannibal or in the pages of BPRD,
Marvel’s take on the mythic Wendigo is a lot more bone simple: they’re
essentially big dumb albino sasquatches that howl their own names. But, the Wendigo did give the Hulk a
run for his money so when it came time for writers to contrive a Canadian Hulk
settling on a Sasquatch/Wendigo/Yeti/Abominable Snowman/Big foot riff was the
obvious choice.
As such, Sasquatch was originally a brilliant physicist
working to recreate the gamma experimented that created the Hulk in attempts to
reverse the process. Something
went wrong, as it always does, and the good doctor was transformed into a
massive, orange, hairy beast. The
big difference is that Sasquatch actually maintains his mind when he transforms
and can actually change between his human and sasquatch forms at will.
It was later introduced that his
mutation wasn’t the result of the gamma beams at all but a rip in reality
created by them and allowing a group of demonic Northern deities known as the
Great Beasts to possess Sasquatch.
I’m fairly certain this concept is no longer on the books but the Great
Beasts do keep popping up as one of the team’s greatest enemies.
NORTHSTAR &
AURORA
Now meet Alpha Flight’s take on Quick Silver and Scarlet
Witch as well as the only reason some fans wrongly consider Alpha Flight part
of the X-Men mythos (seriously, these are the only two mutants on the entire
original team.) The idea with
these two is that they were young mutants scooped up by Department H’s Hull
House Program, a series of half-way houses and foster homes meant to find young
mutants to be press ganged into government service. That’s one of the consistently bizarre things about Alpha Flight,
they’re origin is steeped in government malpractice and abuse of civil
rights. Anyway, eventually the
Hull House program produced these two, fraternal twin mutants with the power to
fly at super speed.
Northstar is obviously the Quick Silver of the team in that
he’s incredibly snide and incredibly European. Both of the twins are native French speakers but Northstar
is much more stuck-up about that fact, also he has elf ears for no definable
reason. His biggest place in the
Marvel universe is as one of the few gay superheroes in the MCU and a frequent
collaborator with the X-Men.
Aurora is less aristocratic but a lot more complicated as her time in a
Catholic shelter pre-Hull House left her with a weird split persona between her
good side and her evil side. It’s
pretty bone simple as far as psychology goes but it does give her actual demons
and the concept even predates Scarlet Witch’s freak-outs in House of M so in that respect she was a
trailblazer.
PUCK
Puck is one of the strangest conceivable team members I’ve
ever come upon. His whole thing is
just that he’s a little person and kind of an acrobat. He doesn’t have any powers or gadgets
or even tactical skill or ninja moves, he can just kind of bounce around pretty
well like a “human hockey puck,” those are the comics’ words not mine.
Despite such a bizarre set-up he’s
actually one of the most enduring Alpha Flight members. A lot of this comes from the fact the
comic is aware of how comical he is without ever undercutting his effectiveness. Sure he’s a hairy little dude in a
dopey costume but he can still bounce around a take out a whole room full of
guys like it was nothing.
He’s a
lot like Bouncing Boy from the Legion of Superheroes that way, in that he’s got
an incredibly dumb name and power but he still gets stuff done. Almost a little too well actually as,
after his death, he became a major agent of Satan in Hell, I am not even
kidding.
This all happened in some
Wolverine comic where Logan got sent to Hell but yeah, Puck was a major grim
reaper of the infernal before returning to the land of the living. Makes you wonder what he did to end up
in Hell, especially given he was always the kindest guy on the team.
MARINA
Marina, much like Puck, is a bizarre character in that initially
she really didn’t have any powers.
You know how people like to joke about Aquaman being the lamest
superhero? Well Marina can
challenge that particular claim.
She’s another marine based hero (obviously,) only rather than being
Atlantean she’s from some weird alien species of hideous monsters.
She occasionally morphs into her true
monstrous form but not often, instead favoring her relatively frail normal look
where she literally has no power other than breathing underwater. I have no idea why she ended up on the
initial team line-up other than setting up her people as an alien invasion
threat.
Thankfully, the 2011 Alpha Flight revival fixed a lot of
this, giving her actual superpowers and a real identity to back them up rather
than just “sheepish fish out of water.”
The 2011 version of Marina is kick-ass aquatic punk alien who quotes
‘80s movies like Repo Man and can
beat up a tank.
It’s a great take
on a weak character, emphasizing big emotions and her role as an alien teenager
on the run from her own people.
Sadly this version of Marina, much like all of the 2011 Alpha Flight
stuff, has never reappeared out of their mini-series but it’s still a dope
send-off to the character.
SHAMAN/TALISMAN
Here’s another double up entry, this time between father and
daughter. Shaman was a founding
member of the team and was pretty much your standard mystical Native American
character. As much as I don’t like
the stereotype it is a big part of pretty much all the major Native American
heroes of Marvel comics save for a handful.
Still, Shaman was an actual character beyond the core
stereotype of using “native magics,” specifically he was something akin to
group dad as he was always the oldest member of the team. He got killed in the same big Omega
Flight smack down that killed Guardian but, luckily, his daughter took up the
family business and adopted the name Talisman.
Talisman, much like Sasquatch, was pretty much the only name
in Canadian superheroes for about a decade and was one of the few classic team
members to get pulled into the joint US-Canadian Omega Flight team during the
Civil War era of Marvel. Like a
lot of mystic superheroes her powers were very broadly defined without much
focus other than “she can do anything because magic,” but she was still a fun
character and defined by something other than just being a medicine woman. Shaman later returned with his comrades
and even got to persist to the present as a reoccurring character in the new Doctor Strange comic book.
SNOWBIRD
Snowbird is one of the only other original characters to
persist consistently. Originally, she was just a
mysterious member of the team nobody knew anything about who could turn into
any animal and fly. Eventually her
origin got fleshed out during the Great Beasts storyline I mentioned
earlier. It turned out Snowbird
was actually part of the same forgotten Canadian pantheon as the Great Beasts
only she was a force for good, it was also revealed she had the power to turn
into any mythical animal as well, including Sasquatch.
It was a weird revelation that didn’t amount to much other
than a way to seal off the beasts and save the day but when the rest of the
team got killed Snowbird managed to endure, as she was technically a god. This eventually landed her a spot as a
major supporting character in Marvel’s bizarre run of late 2000s Incredible Hercules comics.
The Hercules books a strange entity
I’ll probably cover in depth down the line but they were essentially a blend of
mythic fantasy, cosmic event comics, and broad comedy. Snowbird came in as a key member of
Hercules’ God Squad, a team of divine superheroes assembled to deal with an
invasion of Alien Gods attempting to usurp the pantheons of Earth as part of
the Secret Invasion event. Later, Snowbird actually managed to use
her place on the team to resurrect her friends during the Chaos War event so that’s twice she’s saved the entire team from
complete annihilation.
BOX
Now we’re getting into the really G-list Alpha Flight
members, especially in Box’s case cause this guy’s origin is stupid. Box was originally a drone robot used
by the forces of Omega Flight to fight the original team. Though the Box robot did kill the
Guardian the team managed to take down the guy behind it and later decided to
try and use the robot for good…sort of.
The Box robot was damaged in the battle so it needed to be repaired
which is where thing gets weird.
Rather than just rebuilding the robot, its inventor, Roger Bochs, was
approached by a mutant named Madison Jeffries with the power to shape metal,
plastic, and glass with his mind.
Jeffries became the new Box by basically shaping a whole ton of
unconnected mechanical bits around his body through his mutant powers.
It was stupid, I mean ungodly stupid. The origin story is so needlessly
complicated and completely unrewarding I don’t get why they didn’t just have
the inventor put his mind into the robots body or something simple like
that. Yeah, it’s been done before,
but there’s a reason that familiar ideas get to be familiar and that ideas like
“mutant shapes robot body around him” didn’t really catch on. Anyway, eventually the two men got
bitter over who should be allowed to wear the Box armor, the inventor turned
evil, and the mutant guy had to kill him, and nothing of value was lost.
YUKON JACK
Oh good, you always know you’re in for a great character
when they’re named after a liqueur.
No really, that’s actually where Yukon Jack takes his name, it’s advertised
as the “black sheep of Canadian Liquors” and is apparently made from Canadian
whisky and honey.
I don’t really
know why Yukon Jack adopted such a doofey moniker, as there’s nothing about his
character that’s related to alcohol or honey or really any of these
things. I suppose Jack is from the
Canadian Yukon though I’m dubious that his name is Jack given that he’s a
member of the Turpa’lurpa’todian tribe and views himself to be a living God but
what do I know.
Jack was part of a very short lived revamped version of
Alpha Flight in the God awful era that was late ‘90s/early 2000s comics. That may have been a glorious time for
DC but this was right around Marvel’s bankruptcy and easily their worst era so
stuff like Yukon Jack hasn’t aged particularly well.
Well, I say it hasn’t aged well but I kind of doubt Jack was
taken all that seriously at the time.
He was another mystic hero with vaguely defined powers but he did seem
to be able to do anything and clearly wasn’t human. He also married Snowbird as part of an incredibly
complicated and unrewarding story about time travel, robot duplicates, and
everything else that makes non-comic fans disregard the entire medium.
MAJOR MAPLELEAF
You have got to love Major Mapleleaf, I don’t care how
cynical you are this guy is one of the greatest superhero concepts I’ve ever
encounted. Major Mapleleaf is
essentially a stereotype made flesh.
Originating in the ‘90s, because of course, he was a ret-con character,
introduced as someone who’d always been part of the past just never mentioned
before now.
He was apparently part
of the Marvel superhero team the Invaders, a group of allied superheroes led by
Captain America during World War 2.
He’s more or less forgotten now, which is a damn shame and one of the
greatest failings in Marvel history, but his biggest story was when he returned
in the ‘90s to go on a rampage.
See, after WW2 Mapleleaf eventually retired after his son
Maple died from AIDS. So, when
there was a big media fervor over a baby with HIV Mapleleaf went on an angry
rampage believing society didn’t care about his son’s death because his son had
been gay. It was actually a pretty
heavy story for a guy named Major Mapleleaf and dress like a Dudley Do-Right
but it also led to Northstar coming out as gay. The character was briefly revived in the 2004 Alpha Flight
book that also gave us Yukon Jack but that Major Mapleleaf never did anything
as awesome as his dad and his costume was garbage so really who cares?
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