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JOHNNY CANUCKOne of the artists who shared the "grand time" with Dingle at Bell Features and Publishing, was a young man named Leo Bachle. Bachle's involvement with Bell Features began late in 1941 when, as a sixteen-year-old high-school student, he met John Ezrin, Bell's major financial backer. Apparently Ezrin noticed Bachle browsing through some Bell comic books and asked the young man for his opinion of the publications. Bachle, an aspiring comic artist who had been drawing his own strips for several years, did not hesitate to criticize some of the Bell artwork. Ezrin was amused by Bachle's brashness and challenged the young man on the spot to draw an action scene depicting two men fighting. Ezrin was sufficiently impressed by Bachle's drawing to invite him to dream up a comic book character and to bring his idea to the Bell Features office the next day.
That night at home, Bachle created "Canada's super hero" – Johnny Canuck. The next day, Ezrin and Bell Features publisher Cy Bell were favourably impressed with Bachle's creation and the young artist joined the Bell stable of freelancers. And while Bachle would eventually work on a number of different characters in a variety of genres, Johnny Canuck, who made his debut in the first issue of Dime Comics in February 1942, would remain his most famous and popular creation.
Although the second Canadian national superhero was probably inspired in part by U.S. superheroes like Captain America, it is obvious that the character also derived from the nineteenth-century Canadian political-cartooning tradition, in which the Johnny or Jack Canuck figure had been utilized to symbolize Canada. Unlike both Uncle Sam and the British symbol John Bull, who tended to be older, more mature men, Canuck was usually portrayed as a strapping young man in his thirties. Initially, he resembled the habitant figure that cartoonists had used to represent French Canada. As the nation expanded westward, Canuck became more Western in his appearance, sporting knee-high leather boots and a stetson. It is this latter figure that obviously inspired Bachle. However, if the Johnny Canuck of political cartoons was traditionally depicted as a thirty-year-old, Bachle's Johnny was a much younger character, probably in his early twenties. In fact, Johnny sometimes looked even younger and certainly bore more than a passing resemblance to his creator. Created by a high-school student who was forced to watch the war from the sidelines, Johnny not surprisingly became a vehicle for his creator's adolescent fantasies of wartime heroism. In fact, Bachle, who quickly became a celebrity at his high school, later admitted that he hadn't been able to resist the temptation to incorporate into his Johnny Canuck stories references to his friends and enemies at school. Needless to say, it was enormous power for a teenager to wield – the ability to transform a high-school rival into a Nazi villain! Whereas the powerful Nelvana's adventures had to be confined to either Canada or fantastic worlds beneath or above the Earth's surface, Johnny, whose powers (which included a very strong jaw) more closely resembled those of Freelance, was able to plunge headlong into the war. Furthermore, as a secret agent working with partisans and guerilla forces, Johnny, who was a captain in the air force, was obliged to travel to virtually every theatre of war. In fact, it was not until his last exploit, a post-war story published in Dime (No. 28), that he actually had an adventure in Canada.
While Johnny fought the Axis powers in Libya, Russia, Africa, China, Tibet, Yugoslavia and the South Pacific, his most memorable adventure was probably the early mission which took him to Berlin itself. In evidence are all the basic Johnny Canuck story elements: an exotic locale, contact with the anti-Axis underground, a beautiful woman and innumerable, improbable escapes by "Canada's answer to Nazi oppression." However, what distinguished the Berlin story were Johnny's encounters with Hitler himself. During this rip-roaring saga, the Canadian superhero confronts the Führer no less than three times, each encounter ending with Johnny's slugging of the Nazi dictator. It does not take much imagination to realize the sort of thrill Canadian kids must have experienced when their national hero humiliated the ultimate villain.
In terms of the sophistication of his artwork and writing, the teenager Bachle could not, of course, compete with an accomplished veteran like Adrian Dingle; however, Bachle's work visibly improved over the course of his career at Bell. Morever, his artwork compared favourably with most of his contemporaries during the Golden Age, many of whom were, like him, teenage boys (included in their number was Harold Town). As well, what Bachle might have lacked in sophistication, he compensated for with the sheer audacity and power of his breathless graphic narratives. Johnny was like a serial-movie hero who overcame one threat after another, constantly evading his would-be captors. Bachle clearly believed in the character, and this belief invested Johnny with a dynamism and integrity that are still apparent nearly sixty years later. Bachle's raw talent as a comic artist was eventually recognized by a number of American comic book companies, who lured him to New York in 1944. Johnny Canuck, though, was a strong enough character to survive Bachle's departure. His last five appearances in Dime were drawn first by André Kulbach and then Paul Dak. Johnny could not, however, survive the collapse of the English-Canadian comic book industry in 1945-1947. Like Nelvana, he succumbed to the onslaught of American comics. As for his creator, Bachle would leave U.S. comics in the fifties and become a night-club entertainer, changing his name to Les Barker. Today, Barker has not forgotten Johnny Canuck and still looks back fondly on those years when, as a Danforth Tech student in Toronto, he entertained a generation of Canadian kids (and himself) with the exploits of Canada's second national superhero. CANADA JACK
Johnny, however, was not the only male national superhero of Canada's Golden Age of comics. Educational Projects of Montreal, the fifth Canadian comic book company to emerge in the forties, launched a rival character, Canada Jack, in March 1943, in the fifth issue of its main title, Canadian Heroes. Unlike its predecessors, Educational, which was run by Harry J. Halperin, saw the comics not as a medium for escapist adventure, but rather as a vehicle for the edification of children. Accordingly, many issues of Canadian Heroes featured laudatory endorsements from Canadian cabinet ministers.
Nevertheless, Halperin was a businessman and could not help but be aware of the success that his competitors were enjoying with superhero-adventure stories. As a result, when George M. Rae, one of the freelance artists who worked for Educational, approached Halperin and suggested that Canadian Heroes depart from its focus on true stories involving heroes like Canadian explorers and governors general and feature a fictional character – a national superhero named Canada Jack – Halperin gave him the go-ahead. However, from the outset, Halperin insisted that the realistic nature of the character be emphasized, so as not to detract from his firm's wholesome image as an educational publisher. Canada Jack would be a superhero, but one with very limited powers and with very real constraints on the scope of his adventures. Unlike his Bell Features' rivals, Jack would not be fighting little green men from Etheria or regularly associating with exotic beauties in the anti-Axis underground. In a sense, the careers of Canada Jack and Johnny Canuck complemented each other. Like Johnny, Jack's very name identified him as a symbol for Canada. Furthermore, while both heroes were extremely athletic (and some might say inordinately lucky), neither was endowed with the kind of powers that Superman or Nelvana enjoyed. However, whereas Johnny had only one adventure in Canada, Canada Jack had only one adventure abroad. And while Johnny was a superhero designed to fight the Axis head on, Jack was a hero for the home front – his focus would be on the saboteurs and Axis agents who threatened the war effort in Canada.
An expert at jiu-jitsu and an excellent horseman, Jack was also an accomplished gymnast. Appropriately, his costume consisted of a gymnast's outfit with a tank top that featured a Canada Jack crest. Assisting Jack in his adventures were the members of the Canada Jack Club (CJC), a children's group organized to assist the Canadian war effort. While many wartime heroes were joined by young sidekicks, the CJC was quite unique in that it existed both in the Canadian Heroes comic book and in the real world. Organized by Educational's publisher, who worked with children before and after the war, the CJC attracted hundreds of members across Canada from among the readers of Canadian Heroes. Once the club was up and running, each issue would feature CJC news and contests and also a profile of a CJC honour member who had made a signal contribution to the war effort.
Drawn and written by George Menendez Rae, who signed himself variously as Rae, Geo, and Dez, the Canada Jack stories generally lacked the exoticism that characterized the adventures of the other Canadian national superheroes of the 1940s. However, Rae, a Montreal-based graphic artist, managed to create tight, well-paced adventures for Educational's sole superhero character. Over the course of his career, from March 1943 to October 1945, Jack would outwit a host of Nazi agents and dupes: firebugs, rumour mongers, black marketeers, shipyard saboteurs, kidnappers, POW escapees and railway saboteurs. And even though Rae was not as enamoured of the comics medium as someone like Bachle, his work on both the Canada Jack strip and an RCMP strip that he contributed to Canadian Heroes was entirely professional. As a matter of fact, the only other artist at Educational who showed more aptitude for the medium was Sid Barron, who would go on to a distinguished career as a Canadian cartoonist. Like Nelvana and Johnny Canuck, Jack did not survive the resumption of the distribution of American comics in Canada. In fact, Educational withdrew from the market in October 1945, when Bell and a number of other companies were still very much determined to remain in the business and endeavouring to arrange for the shipment of their comics into the U.S. Perhaps Educational's demise was just as well, though, because once the Axis menace was removed, Jack's adventures became increasingly mundane – so mundane that the villain of his last adventure was a blue jay. Like Adrian Dingle, Rae left the comics field and returned to the commercial art field. And again like Dingle, he would later pursue a fine-arts career. In fact, after the war, the two creators of Canadian national superheroes would become friends. With the demise of the original Canadian comics through the 1945-1947 period, the Golden Age came to an end. The appearance of Dingle's Nelvana of the Northern Lights in the F. E. Howard Company's Super Duper (No. 7) in May 1947 marked the last story of the Golden Age featuring a Canadian national superhero. Ironically, the story was also the first adventure of a Canadian national superhero to appear in colour, and it thus seemed to promise a bold new future for Nelvana and the other Guardians of the North. Instead, the next generation of Canadian kids would thrill to the adventures of foreign heroes. |
 
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