Canadians! They walk among us unnoticed but what are they really planning? And do they really have a Comics “heritage”? According to this Literary Review of Canada review of Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe, yes.

Like many rowdy teenagers of the era, comics met with adult resistance and restrictions: in the late 1940s, Parliament passed a law forbidding crime comics. (Brian Mulroney, then ten years old but already on the make, won gold stars from the grown-up world for giving speeches denouncing bad comics. Even as a prepubescent he was eager to please the powers-that-be and later attached himself to the anti-comics conservative politician Davie Fulton.) In youthful revolt, comics went through a rebellious phase in the 1960s, with counterculture heroes such as Harold Hedd experimenting with drugs and polymorphic sex.

The long-delayed adulthood of Canadian comics came in the early 1990s, when a cohort of artists used the form for personal expression. Aside from Seth and Brown, the important figures were Julie Doucet (an artist with a remarkable ability to plop her subconscious right on the printed page with surrealistic strips about cities drowning in menstrual blood and lewd beer bottles hitting on young women), Ho Che Anderson (whose comic strip biography of Martin Luther King was notable for its unvarnished honesty in dealing with race and sex) and David Collier (an artist who has recreated in comic book form the old Canadian persona of the backwoods yarn spinner).

More in the link. [Hat tip: Colleen]