Cree, Canadian and American: Negotiating Sovereignties with Jeff Lemire's Equinox and "Justic League Canada"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian and Torontonian Joe Shuster co-created Superman in 1938, drawing on his experiences at the Toronto Daily Star to define Clark Kent’s everyday life as a reporter. Despite Shuster’s Canadian co-authorship of the definitive American comic book superhero, John Bell suggests “Canadians are probably too wary of the uncritical portrayal of unrestrained heroism and power for the superhero genre ever to become a mainstay of the country's indigenous comic art” (84). Bell’s comments express national scepticism towards American myths of heroism, perhaps best summed up in the equally iconic Canadian trope of the ‘beautiful loser’. Whilst comic books may heighten these distinct senses of a national narrative, they are also the potential sites of encounter for intersecting national cultural narratives. Onesuch encounter can be seen in the recent “Justice League Canada” storyline of American publisher DC Comics’ Justice League United. Echoing its past connections with Canada, DC Comics’ Canadian cartoonist Jeff Lemire has created a superhero team storyline set explicitly in Northern Ontario, Canada, also introducing an Indigenous female superhero named Equinox to the DC comic book universe. Cree, and from Moose Factory, Ontario, the hero Equinox is in everyday life the teenager Miiyahbin Marten. Whilst the ‘DC universe’ is firmly a realm of the fantastic, Lemire’s storyline underscores how its characters provide real-life negotiations of American, Canadian and Indigenous identity. National boundaries, identities and sovereignties are potentially re-enforced and challenged through “Justice League Canada,” and particularly in the visualisation of Equinox. The mainstream storyworlds of American comic books are complicated by this negotiation of plural sovereignties.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.062 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".