BY: DANIEL KORN
When asked who their favourite superheroes are, most people would answer with the typical DC or Marvel staples: Spider-Man, Superman, maybe Iron Man or Rocket Raccoon thanks to the newer movies. But not Hope Nicholson; she’s more likely to give you names like Nelvana of the Northern Lights or Brok Windsor. For the past year and a half, Nicholson, both independently and with collaborators, has been focusing on reprinting the forgotten stories of Canada’s comic book history.
Between 1941 and 1946, Canada’s “War Exchange Preservation Act” restricted the trade of “non-essential” goods with the United States in order to combat the growing trade deficit. Comic books were included in this category, so for those five years of wartime, Canadian devotees of Captain America and the like had no way to get their fix of fictionalized Nazi-punching. Seeing a lucrative hole to be filled, four publishing companies – Anglo-American Publishing, Maple Leaf Publishing, Hillborough Studios, and Bell Features – printed their own stories, and for a short time, superheroes that actually reflected the tastes of Canadians were all the rage. The interiors of the books were black-and-white, leading to the comics being referred to as “Whites”. But after the war, the trade restrictions were lifted, and kids were back to following the usual exploits of DC and Marvel superheroes, leaving the Golden Age of Canadian Comics behind.
For almost 70 years, these stories remained out-of-print and forgotten by the world at large. After writing several essays about Canadian comic books in university, Nicholson became particularly enamoured with Nelvana of the Northern Lights, created by Adrien Dingle, who happens to be one of the first female superheroes ever published, debuting a few months before DC’s Wonder Woman. Her passion for the character led to her and her creative partner, Rachel Richey, becoming the sole holders of the rights to reprint the character’s stories, and in November 2013 they successfully crowdfunded the money necessary to do so, raising more than double the $25,000 they asked for. The complete collection of Nelvana stories has since been printed in both hard and soft-cover, with a second printing already available from American publisher IDW.
Not satisfied with bringing just one Canadian character back from the dead, Nicholson created a second Kickstarter independently, this time centred around a reprint of Jon Stables’ Brok Windsor, a Canadian doctor who stumbles onto a land of giants during a canoe trip, grows to their size, and gains super-strength. Once again, the Kickstarter succeeded, making almost double its asking price.
More recently, Nicholson has shifted her focus from forgotten fictional characters to forgotten real-life cultures. It’s an understatement to say that Canada —and really North America in general—has a fraught history with our Natives, and representation remains horrendous across virtually all media. In superhero comics alone, the number of significant indigenous characters can be counted on one hand, and most of them exhibit stereotypical characteristics like feathered headdresses and tomahawks. To combat this, Nicholson’s newest crowdfunding project is a comic anthology produced by AH Comics Inc. and edited by herself, called Moonshot, which showcases, in the words of the campaign itself, “the rich heritage and identity of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis storytelling.” After just three days, it’s already received about half of its asking $54,000.
Nicholson’s projects—so quickly and enthusiastically funded—are telling of the poor job the Canadian publishing industry has done in keeping our cultural history intact. These are pockets of Canada’s identity that have been hidden from the current generation for too long, and we have passionate people like Nicholson to thank for making sure they aren’t gone forever.
