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CAPITAINE KÉBEC
The year after Captain Canada's disappearance, a second satirical superhero, Capitaine Kébec, made his debut in Les Aventures du Capitaine Kébec (No. 1). Issued by L'Hydrocépahle entêté of Montreal, Les Aventures was the first French-language comic to depict a Canadian national superhero. The chief creator of Capitaine Kébec was Pierre Fournier, one of the leading artists and writers active in what is known as the Spring of Quebec Comics (les bandes desineés or BD for short). In his first adventure, Kébec – very much a counterculture superhero – is pitted against an Establishment villain called Frogueman.
Quebec's superhero assembles a truly unique costume from materials at hand: welder's safety goggles, an aviator's helmet, a Saint-Jean-Baptiste sweater, sneakers, a watch without hands and a towel for a cape.
The nefarious Frogueman, a Montreal cop dismayed by the erosion of respect for authority in the new Quebec, battles the youthful Kébec on the streets of Montreal. Armed with his pea-soup gun, Frogueman soon gets the upper hand.
Les Aventures du Capitaine Kébec ceased publication before Fournier could finish Kébec's first adventure; however, he would return to the character over a decade later. Meanwhile, a number of other silly national superheroes appeared, including John Bell and Owen Oulton's spoof of Captain Canuck – Captain Canduck. Although during the seventies and early eighties Capitaine Kébec made a number of cameo appearances in the comics of many different Quebecois creators, it was not until 1984 that Fournier himself finally returned to the depiction of the character, in the pages of the Quebecois BD magazine Titanic. Like many of his predecessors, Fournier both wrote and drew his Capitaine Kébec strip. In his second published Kébec story, the focus is on a TV journalist named Josée, who sets out to prepare a piece on the Capitaine for the television programme Profil. Josée discovers that Kébec is merely one of a long line of Quebecois national superheroes. The bold, uncluttered style that Fournier adopted for Kébec's three-part Titanic adventure was deceptively simple. Each finished page of graphic narrative was preceded by numerous sketches and studies as well as a full-page rough. In the Titanic story, Kébec and Josée are attacked by the villainous Dr. Bébitte.
In these four pages, which comprise the final installment of Capitaine Kébec's Titanic adventure, the journalist Josée is forced to don the Capitaine Kébec costume and carry on the battle against Bébitte. As the story ends, Josée herself becomes the latest incarnation of Kébec. Fournier's superhero has become a superheroine.
One of the first national superheroes to appear in Canadian political cartooning was Aislin's depiction of Prime Minister Trudeau as Captain Canada. Published following the passage of the War Measures Act in 1970, the cartoon utilizes the notion of a Canadian superhero to ridicule the government's response to the October Crisis.
In utilizing superheroes, cartoonists are able to draw on a genre that is familiar to their readers to poke fun at our politicians' self-images, as in this portrayal of Parti Québécois leader René Lévesque as a Capitaine Québec figure. The familiar U.S. superhero mythologies are so pervasive that our cartoonists frequently make jokes about superheroes and phone booths, without fear that such Superman gags will be lost on their readers. In this example, the gap between the national superhero's self-image and reality is especially wide.
Zazulak gently pokes fun at the idea of the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark as a Captain-Canada-style saviour who will successfully lead the country out of its national-unity difficulties. Whatever his final role, it is obvious that Mr. Clark will not be the last figure to wear a Captain Canada costume. Canada will always need its own superheroes, whether as objects of admiration or as targets of satire. |
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