Canada’s national hero is back and better than ever. Captain Canuck relaunched today with a new number one issue written and drawn by Toronto-based artist Kalman Andrasofszky.
The return to glory of the Great White North’s greatest hero came after the character’s lengthy absence from the public eye.
A call was placed by Fadi Hakim to Richard Comely, the man who created Captain Canuck 40 years ago and Comely licensed the rights to the character. Initially, it was unclear what Hakim and partners Paul Gardner and Dean Henry wanted to do with Canuck, whether it was comics or animation or webisodes. The result was a series of webisodes that featured such voice talent as Tatiana Maslany and Laura Vandervoort.
When it came time to move ahead with a comic reboot, the job was offered to Francis Manapul. However, being a DC exclusive creator, Manapul had to pass on the project. That’s when it was offered to Andrasofszky.
“Hell yeah I’ll do it,” Andrasofszky said, recalling the conversation with his studio mate at the Royal Academy of Illustration and Design.
“The first thing they wanted was to change Redcoat into a woman, to Starbuck her,” Andrasofszky said, referring to the Battlestar Galactica reboot’s changing of Starbuck into a woman. “I said I think Kebec should be a girl, not Redcoat.” In the end, both characters changed genders.
Buoyed by the success of the web series, Hakim, Gardner, Henry and Andrasofszky set out to introduce, or reintroduce, the character back to comic book fans. Andrasofszky said part of the plan with the relaunch is keeping things as Canadian as possible. “We wanted everyone involved in the process, from soup to nuts, to be Canadian.” Andrasofszky noted that Comely is involved in the process “in a Stan Lee capacity. Richard gets a peek at everything and he’s definitely consulted, but it’s more of a passing of the torch situation. He gets an overview of what’s happening and gives us his blessing. So far there have been zero problems; he’s been very supportive of it all.”
Andrasofszky redesigned the characters for the webisodes and carried those designs over to the new series. Of all the new looks, it’s the one he created for the Captain himself that he’s most proud of. “There was something I had in my head when I was a kid growing up,” he said. “Reading comics in Canada, I was very aware of Captain Canuck and characters like Guardian (from Marvel’s Alpha Flight) and the way flag elements were incorporated. I also liked Captain Britain and later, the Ultimate version of Captain America. Trying to work flag elements into a costume has always been interesting to me. I tried to incorporate the best from all these characters into something archetypal.”
Andrasofszky is handling both art and writing chores for issues one and two, and will yield the penciling chores to industry veteran Leonard Kirk, who just completed a run on Marvel’s Fantastic Four. “We are lucky to have him,”Andrasofszky said. “We cornered him and just the right moment. Leonard has a connection to the character: his first work in the industry was doing some Canuck comics for Richard back in the early 1990s.
Of all the characters in the book’s cast, Andrasofszky says he’s having the most fun writing Redcoat.
“Redcoat is really coming to life for me. I didn’t have a good sense of where Redcoat would be when I started. Her role in the first few issues was more of a Nick Fury sort of role, not so much in the thick of it. She’s English, not Canadian, so I’m trying hard to nail the syntax and language to make her sound English when she talks. She and Canuck have a bond I didn’t expect them to have when I started.”
The book’s publisher, Chapter House Comics, has been wonderful to work with, Andrasofszky said. “They’ve got a clear vision of what they’re looking for, but they’re also very receptive to any ideas I have, even if they come out of left field. They’ve given me a lot of rope to hang myself with!
“I’m very lucky to be working with these guys,” he added. “I’ve been working in the industry for 15 years and I’ve written a few little things, but this is by far the biggest thing I’ve taken on. I’m very proud and grateful to be able to tackle a character I care so much about on my first time out, have people who believe in me and are so supportive of my ideas and that my first script for someone else is for Leonard, who is a genius.”
The first six issues, according to Andrasofszky, are split into two mini arcs, with the first two “almost like a pre-credits action sequence.”
Andrasofszky is handling the modern version of Captain Canuck in the new series, but that iteration of the character isn’t the only one featured in the book. Ed Brisson, writer of Cluster for IDW, will pen standalone tales of the original Captain, set in the past. “We wanted to have something for both old and new fans. When the original series ended, Captain Canuck was trapped in 1981, and Ed’s stories sort of pick up from that point.
“If you were a fan of the original, there are things in there that will delight you,” he said. “If you’ve never read a Captain Canuck story before, there’s nothing to stop you from enjoying it for what it is, a little retro superhero romp.”
Andrasofszky hasn’t taken the time to reflect on the pressure and importance of remaking a national icon, saying, “as a freelancer, you rarely have time to sit back and look at the big picture. We all have vague notions of where we want our career to go, and it’s kind of nosing the boulder up the mountain an inch at a time because there’s always another deadline, another deadline crunch.
“This project has been part of my work day for the past two years and will be even after I’m not drawing the main stories. I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath and think about [re-making an icon],” he added.
Five years ago, Andrasofszky was given the honour of presenting the entire creative team on the original series their award as they were inducted into the Shuster Hall Fame. He had a connection, tenuous he admits, to a member of that original crew.
“I was doing covers for a book for DC called R.E.B.E.L.S. and the interior artist was Claude St. Aubin,” he said. “That was the connection the Shuster people found. As I stood up there, reading the entire history of Captain Canuck, I never could have imagined that two years later the character would become the centrepiece of my professional life.”
The Free Comic Book Day issue of Captain Canuck is available here.
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