Move over, Captain Canuck and Alpha Flight . Our home and native land’s superhero population is set to expand as Justice League Canada steps up to save the world.
On Friday afternoon, at Toronto’s sprawling Fan Expo convention, DC Comics will announce that its flagship superhero team — which has included such celebrity superheroes as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern — is going to uproot from the U.S.A. and be headquartered north of the border in the spring of 2014. The ongoing Justice League of America series will be renamed and feature a new Canadian character alongside some of the world’s best-known heroes.
Better yet, it will be written by Toronto’s own Jeff Lemire , who has become one of DC’s superstar writers, and now gets the chance to bring those heroes to his familiar stomping ground.
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“This is like my ultimate dream job,” said Lemire during an interview earlier this week. “It sounds like a joke and something like this would never happen, but it is actually happening, and I couldn’t be happier.”
Much of the action will take place in Toronto, Lemire says, but the actual team will be based around James Bay and Moosonee.
“I do want to create a cool, rural Northern Ontario headquarters for Justice League Canada, and I don’t want to spoil it yet.
“And it’s not a hockey rink, I promise. Although, of course, it did cross my mind,” he says with a laugh.
This is big news for Canadian superhero fans. Apart from The X-Men ’s Wolverine , by far the best known and most beloved Canuck superhero, there has been the independent Captain Canuck comic, as well as Alpha Flight , Marvel’s superhero team spawned by a top-secret Canadian government department, which featured characters like Sasquatch and Snowbird, and which, in its ’80s heyday, was written and drawn by celebrated Canadian comics creator John Byrne.
“It’s not really like Alpha Flight , as we’re not creating a bunch of very Canadian characters,” Lemire says. “Like those characters are all almost clichéd Canadian archetypes. This is still very much set in the regular Justice League universe and the team will still have some of the bigger named superheroes, but they will actually be located in Canada now, and there will be a couple of new members who are Canadian. So obviously as a Canadian, and as a Canadian storyteller, it’s something I’m very proud of.”
Lemire said the idea initially came from Dan DiDio, DC’s publisher, and he admits that he, too, first thought it was a joke. But when he realized his boss was being serious, he gladly accepted the challenge and “has kind of gone crazy with it.”
The northward migration will come after the ongoing crossover comics event Trinity War , in which the current three Justice League teams clash, and the ensuing Forever Evil , in which the villains of the DC Universe take over.
“As a result of that, without spoiling any of that story, there will be major changes in the Justice Leagues, and in the spring, the current Justice League of America team goes through a dramatic change and some of the pieces that are left behind will evolve into this new Justice League Canada team.”
Lemire says that the new Canadian character is going to be a big story point, and he can’t reveal too much, but he says: “I’m trying to make a character that reflects a real part of our cultural identity, who could be a real Canadian teenager. That’s what I’m really after with that.”
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In addition, Lemire says that he will be bringing back Adam Strange , a Silver Age DC character, a swashbuckling archaeologist who is transported to the far-off planet of Rann. In this new incarnation, he will also be Canadian. Comics continuity can be a mind-bending thing to try to explain, but one of the reasons Lemire has a free hand with characters is that DC relaunched all of its titles two years ago in an initiative called The New 52 , giving all of their long-standing characters a fresh start.
Lemire can’t say who will make up Justice League Canada, but says it is a “dream team” of A-list DC characters and some of his favourite oddball and more obscure heroes.
“It really is just trying to make an honest portrayal of the places and the country and people that I know. That’s why I’m setting it in Toronto and Northern Ontario, because those are the places that I really know well,” he says.
“I’m just trying to create a genuine backdrop for these stories that are big and cosmic in scope, but are still really grounded in a real place. As long as I keep that focused, I’ll probably avoid clichés, but sometime those clichés are clichés because they’re true, so I’m sure some of that will slip in there.”
The Northern Ontario setting is not a stranger for those familiar with Lemire’s work, since he’s from there, and his breakout work was the Essex County trilogy, a critically acclaimed independent series of graphic novels.
Beyond working on the scripts for Justice League Canada , Lemire is continuing to write the ongoing Green Arrow series, as well as writing and painting Trillium , his recently launched and well-received space epic for Vertigo, DC’s line of comics for mature readers.
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