Thursday, June 15, 2017

Canadianas' Sesquicentennial Struggles

I must admit, when I first saw the announcement below, I thought it was a joke. It was posted on artist Sandy Carruthers' Facebook page.
Coming July 1st: The new adventures of Canadiana! Written by the amazing Mark Shainblum (creator of Northguard to name a few) and illustrated by me! I'm very stoked to see her return (since 2006!), and will post more info/website at a later date!

It's not that the notion of Canadiana's return is so ludicrous, mind you. Quite the opposite.  I've enjoyed her all-too-few appearances to this point. And it has long felt like her return was simmering (at low heat, granted) and just waiting for the right time to happen.

It was more a matter of the above image being a Canadian spin on an old Captain America comic. And when writer Mark Shainblum referred to the cover in a comment to the above post, he called it an "in-joke". This caused me to think that we were just being offered a pin-up of the character inspired by a classic cover. But subsequent comments by Shainblum seem to support that we will indeed have new Canadiana material on July 1st. So...Yay!

Are you new to Canadiana? If so, several of the pages of the web comic, which ran from about 2003 to 2006, are posted on Mark Shainblum's deviantart page so there's your opportunity to educate yourself a bit.

The entire story, at least to the point it had reached (I have 33 pages stored), was posted on a site called Comic Dish for a while but that now appears to have gone dormant. Perhaps her revival will cause those to resurface as well. In the meantime, here are the first two pages by way of introduction.