Chasing Captain Canada: National Identity Challenged Through Superheroes In Canadian Comic Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the connections between nationalism and the superheroic effigy in domestically produced Canadian superhero comics, with an eye on how Indigenous superhero comics published within Canada may enrich or complicate this landscape. Domestically produced comics and/or graphic novels are defined in this thesis as ones authored and published within Canada. Canadian-produced comics often fail to reach the heights they grope towards: an uncomplicated heroism. In this thesis, heroism is separated from Canadian heroism, which is further troubled through visual and textual representations of nationalisms—maple leaves, arctic climates—and expressions and appropriations of Indigeneity as it pertains to the superhero. These Canadian nationalisms, dovetailing with the supposed Canadian inferiority complex, have slowed down the growth of this genre while simultaneously leaving room for it to expand through the Canadian compulsion to trouble its own nationalisms. Unsettled nationalisms, as they appear in superhero comics—a canon that has traveled the spectrum of gentle incredulity to effigy—prompt Canadians to ask themselves if they have a need for superheroes, or if Canadian superheroes can only fill the roles of super defenders. The thesis examines the superheroes Nelvana from Adrian Dingle’s Nelvana of the Northern Lights (1941), Captain Canuck from Richard Comely’s Captain Canuck (1975), Northguard from Mark Shainblum and Gabriel Morrissette’s New Triumph Featuring Northguard (1984), and Kagagi from Jay Odjick’s (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg) Kagagi: The Raven (2010). An exploration of these comics, supported by comic book theory, theories of nationalism in Canadian literature, and scholarship on representations of Indigenous peoples in graphic literatures, shows that the text, the art, and the intersections of both express and challenge outlooks on Canadian heroic figures, while the perspectives of Indigenous people living in Canada both adhere to and complicate these conclusions.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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".