Back to basics

Every culture creates heroes in its own image: it’s difficult to imagine transferring the British adventurers — Rudolf Rassendyll and Richard Hannay, the Saint and 007 — to America. Likewise, ‘superheroes’ — guys in gaudy tights and capes flying through the streets — never quite work outside the United States. Marvel had a Captain Britain in the Seventies, and Jim Callaghan’s decrepit wasteland could certainly have used one. But he was the superhero equivalent of Elvis impersonators’ night in Romford. I seem to recall a Captain Canada, too, and a few other attempts at Canuck heroes — Mapleman? Beavergirl? — but contemporary Canada is not an heroic culture, never mind a superheroic one. There are other, older American archetypes — the stoic taciturn cowboy, etc. — but the early superheroes created in the Thirties and Forties embody the confidence of the national culture at the dawn of the US imperium.