Red and white tights: representations of national identity in Canadian comic books

Though produced in the shadow of the American comic-book industry, Canadian comics both explicitly and implicitly engage themes of national identity. This thesis extends historical fan scholarship into an examination of some of these nationalist themes in the context of Canadian art and culture. Canadian adventure comics developed in the 1940s to fill a wartime vacuum; generic conventions of American superhero comics were reworked for the new context, incorporating elements of the ‘Northwoods’ genre of Mountie film and pulp literature. This is accompanied by the exoticization of the wilderness and its incorporation into national identity as a marker of exotic difference.