“You gotta give the people what they want. The more they get, the more they need, and every time they get harder and harder to please.” From Give The People What They Want, written by Ray Davies.

They say timing is everything, and to my experience that concept is as reliable as gravity and every bit as explainable. In the comic book world, it was announced a bit ago that our friends Ty Templeton and Dan Parent are doing an “Archie Meets Captain Canuck” crossover.

That’s cool. I’ve always liked Archie; well, the super-teen stuff not as much because “America’s typical teen-ager” isn’t a “typical” superhero. I’ve also always liked Captain Canuck. It’s fair play: the star-spangled Nazi-puncher Captain America has been successful. Captain Britain, the other flag-draped patriotic powerhouse, was first published after Captain Canuck debuted.

Captain Canuck was created in 1975 — that’s fifty-one years ago, for those of us who are digitally challenged. It was created by British-born Canadian artist Richard Comely and his friend Ron Leishman. As the first Canadian superhero since World War II, it was, arguably, the first “independent” comic book published in color. According to Wikipedia, that first issue had a print run of 170,000 copies.

Back in 1975, there weren’t a whole lotta North American comic books with that kind of print run. Five years later, the Canadian post office printed six million Captain Canuck stamps. That was a full three years before the United States postal service issued their first Superman stamp. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: Timing Is Everything” →