3 out of 5

There’s a definite reverence for the source material in this reboot / re-presentation of classic (…if you’re a Canadian of a certain age) comic character Captain Canuck by Chapterhouse publishing and oft-artist Kalman Andrasofszky; unfortunately, that reverence is more of an attitude than something that inspires; our first six-issue arc isn’t bad – and is absolutely buoyed by this respect for/embracing of history – but it doesn’t translate to something more remarkable than normal superheroics.

That said, there are many notable positives here, certainly enough to justify a TPB read: the Cap, in his super-powered suit, isn’t a god-like go-it-alone hero, absolutely needing the support of his trained team of sharpshooters and pilots and the like, which balances the book’s cheeky, Silver Age-y tone out with some ground-level group dynamics; Andrasofszky also proves to be especially adept at not only unpacking a fairly complicated setup, but also at juggling scene-chewing badguy dialogue and hero one-liners with more sober, well-paced wordage.  …Not that these words end up being put to the use of the most engaging story, with the mentioned scene-chewing villain – Mr. Gold, who, eh, controls gold i.e. makes it move and Blorp! about and zombify people – just sort of wants to something something control the world, I guess, and thus when we’re not action sceneing, the issues are more filled out by flashbacks to the Captain Canuck team’s origins, and those of our leader’s brother, who’s entwined with Mr. Gold.  This is where Kalman really does well, never over-staying his welcome in these past moments or spelling out too much of anything that we can’t put together ourselves, and really I dig the decision to start en media res instead of frontloading us with all this info.

(On the flip, that’s the reverence problem: you get the sense that Kalman might be shorting us on deets because he’s already familiar with them.  So the familiarity gives the scenes confidence, but the structure itself doesn’t given them much importance.)

Artist (for most of the issues) Leonard Kirk handles the madness pretty well, with a blocky Cully Hamner dependability to his figurework, but our writer – as he’s more often an artist – may not have known how to describe his pages effectively and / or Kirk’s framing isn’t on par, as the action is really compressed and it’s hard to tell when, like, big crazy things are happening until the next panel when someone responds to them.

So besides the Canadian background that likely makes CC unfamiliar to most of us, this would be your average comic, but one that’s surprisingly confident for a first arc, reading more like something you’ve picked up midway through.  That has the benefit of not slowing down to trawl through setup exposition, but when you note that you are, actually, at the beginning and not midway through something, it undermines the story’s accessibility at the same time.