One Year In

It's been a little over a year since I started this blog as a notebook of sorts with which I could track, and support, Canadian comic book characters.

It's been interesting and educational.  The Canadian comic industry is both in better and worse condition than I thought at the time.

On the upside, I discovered a lot of new (to me) talent and that's been fun.  I've also met (online, anyway) quite a few people with a similar interest, which is encouraging.

On the downside, that "new" talent does not seem to be supported particularly well at home.  Unless appearances are deceiving, there are at least a couple of good-sized publishers in Canada (another "plus" that I wasn't really aware of), but their "Can-Con" is actually quite limited, both in terms of characters and creators.

Meanwhile, it doesn't get much more Canadian than Heroes of the North, yet their comics are published through New York-based Ardden Entertainment.  And why could a project like Northern Guard not be published by Canadians?

So Canadian publishers don't publish Canadian characters, and Canadian characters, for the most part, must be self-published or published by American companies. The more examples of this I came across, the less I understood it.

Now I do understand that I am on the outside looking in.  Truthfully, I suspect there's an aspect to this that is obvious to those "in the business" that I'm totally missing.  Someone "inside" will read this and think I'm pathetically uninformed.  Truthfully, that person will be correct.

And of course this isn't the case across the board.  There are anthology books (see True Patriot and Masked Mosaic at right) planned that will be "All-Canadian" that I'm very much looking forward to, for example.

But by and large, I expected that reading about Canadian characters meant supporting Canadian publishers and that has not been the case, for the most part.  It seems like it should be, but it isn't.