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Sunday, October 19, 2014

Canada: Where the Good Whiskey Comes From



The above is from the Night Raven: House of Cards graphic novel, first published by Marvel UK in 1991.

I read the character's first graphic novel two years ago and if I hadn't read on another website that he is Canadian, I would never have known. There is little, if any, reference to his background in Night Raven: The Collected Stories.

Night Raven is the driver in the above partial scan of a page from House of Cards, however I still found myself questioning whether claims that he was Canadian were accurate. In the scene, he's trying to avoid being recognized and drawing attention to himself. It seemed very likely then that he was making up a background story for that purpose.There is one flashback vision later in the book that effectively confirms his half-native ancestry, but it does not specify that he was born and/or raised in Canada.

However, I failed to realize earlier that the two graphic novels can nearly be considered book ends to the character's adventures. The Collected Stories reprint his first 20 appearances in the UK's Hulk Comic. I believed that House of Cards did something similar with subsequent comic book short stories, but it does not. Night Raven's adventures following those in Hulk are actually text stories starting in a book called "Marvel Superheroes" (issue 382). I suspect that much of his background is actually detailed in those, and that is why a few resources are able to confidently state that Night Raven was born in southern Alberta in the early 1900's.

The unfortunate thing about the text stories is that they have not been collected or reprinted in any way since (that I could determine, anyway) and it seems rather unlikely that they every will be. That's too bad, because a few were written by Alan Moore prior to Watchmen being published by DC Comics.  I would love to see Moore's take on the character and may just have to find a way to track those down.

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