Captain Canuck turns 50 this year, and the creator of the homegrown Canadian superhero says there's more interest in the character than ever, thanks to President Trump. Richard Comely says that after Trump's tariffs and annexation threats, he has heard from a lot of Canadian companies with a "keen interest" in the character, the BBC reports. "All of a sudden Canadians are looking to Captain Canuck as a symbol. And it's basically, to them, Captain Canuck symbolizes independence," he tells Reuters. "In a sense, we have Mr. Trump to thank for a bit of resurgence," he says.
The character is a former Mountie who gained superhuman strength from an encounter with aliens. When he first appeared in comics in 1975, he was depicted as defending Canada from various threats in the then-distant future of 1993. "Of course, never, never in any of those stories was it America that was going to be taking over Canada," Comely says. The captain is a "tough-minded idealist" whose "successful career is due to his ability to combine virtue, French, physical fitness, courtesy, the metric system and a form-fitting costume into a real hero role," CBC reporter Lloyd Robertson said in 1975, per the Winnipeg Free Press.
For the cover of the 50th anniversary issue, Comely drew Captain Canuck wagging his finger at Trump, reports Reuters. "It's got a lot of Canadians, you know, thinking about their identity as Canadians and feeling more united as Canadians," Comely says of the tariffs and threats to make Canada the 51st US state. "We feel like, okay, we've got to stand in opposition to these proposals." He tells the Free Press it's "really disappointing" that the US has a president "generating a lot of unnecessary animosity between two countries, and people say they're negotiation tactics. Well, they're terrible tactics." (More Canada stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
