We Stand On Guard #1 Writer: Brian K. Vaughan Artist: Steve Skroce Dammit.  I was hoping to avoid having to do a cliched review about the overt Canadian-ness of this comic.  Sure, the release date just happens to fall on Canada Day (well played, Image), but it's also three days before America's Independence Day, so I was hoping to be unique and write about this book from a strictly American angle.  Having read the book now, it's safe to say that it's impossible to do that.  This book oozes Canada like maple syrup from a moose in a provincial forest.

Capturing Canada in a comic book is hard, because it often comes off as silly.  Rather than just having the story incidentally set in Canada, writers often overemphasize just how Canadian that Canada is.  Consider the original Alpha Flight team: they were as emphatically Canadian as possible with a guy wrapped in the flag, a bigfoot, a French skier, a Catholic schoolgirl, an Inuit goddess, a shaman, and a guy named after a piece of hockey equipment.  We love Alpha Flight, but we probably love them because they’re so hokey in the way that only Marvel Comics can pull off.  (This only seems to be a problem with foreign countries.  90 percent of Marvel Comics are set in New York, but when they venture outside the Big Apple, the presentation isn’t always awful.  Cullen Bunn moved Venom to Philadelphia, but we didn’t see him eating cheesesteaks and riding the SEPTA every single panel.)

So if We Stand On Guard has one weakness–and just one, because I really did like this story–it’s that Vaughan has no subtlety in reminding you that this story is set in the Great White North.  Real Canadian businesses like Tim Horton’s and Canadian Tire still exist in Vaughan’s bleak future.  The Quebecois are apparently still a people apart from their Anglophone neighbors, because one of the characters exclusively speaks French.  (Fact: most Quebecois are comfortably bilingual.)  A character is seen reading a copy of Gil Anderson’s The Outlander, a real novel about–prophetically–a Canadian woman fleeing across the wilderness.  And of course, the story opens in the year 2112, an obvious reference to Canadian rock band Rush’s ballad about a bleak and tyrannical future.  In other words: comic set in Canada is very Canadian.

Now, what is worth pointing out is that Vaughan seems to do a good job of capturing a foreign fear of the United States, magnified to an absurd degree based on the hypothetical scenario of an American invasion of its northern neighbor a century from now.  I’ve been married to a Canadian for over a decade (she hasn’t picked up American citizenship, and she loves her country too much to ever do it) and I frequently travel there to see her family.  We’ve driven the length of the Canada from Dawson City to Montreal, and still haven’t scratched the surface of exploring the place.  As an American, I do always have a sense of Canadians being “like me, but not quite.”  They speak English, have much of the same entertainment as us, shop at many of the same stores we do.  Yet despite sharing a continent, there’s plenty of differences across the border.  Being an American in Canada, it really does feel like you’ve stepped into a slightly twisted version of the States with a weird European overlay and that awful, awful metric system.

Conversely, I get the sense that Canadians have the same “other” sense about Americans.  Oh, my wife’s relatives love me just fine and have accepted me into the family as one of their own.  Still, I often see Canadians as very fascinated by what goes on down here.  They’re always concerned with our politics and our military.  I often see Canadians fascinated by the U.S. President, whoever’s in office–some love him, some hate him, but they’re always watching and wondering how he’s going to affect international affairs.  They probably know that whatever international affair the U.S. gets into next, Canada will probably follow.  (I served with Canadians in Afghanistan.  I doubt they would have been there if we weren’t.)  There’s some level of admiration for the U.S. on Canada’s part, but probably tempered with a bit of caution–we’re a friendly neighbor, but a big brash neighbor who wields an equally big stick.

So as I said, I think Vaughan’s story effectively captures and magnifies those feelings through the absurd scenario of a U.S. invasion of Canada.  Our story opens with two kids, Amber and Tommy, and their parents watching a 9/11-level event in the States and wondering who’s to blame.  Tommy wonders if Canada could have been behind it, recalling the War of 1812 exactly 300 years earlier.  (Again–well played.)  Sure enough, Amber and Tommy’s family is killed in a retaliatory U.S. strike moments after…and then the story jumps ahead 12 years to find an adult Amber foraging in the wilderness, an insurgent in her own country.

Credit is due to Steve Skroce (a Canadian artist, of course), who presents a phenomenal glimpse of future hi-tech urban Canada and the natural, bleak-and-beautiful wilderness.  The Northwest Territories are astonishingly juxtaposed against Skroce’s view of American military future-tech, including a dog-like drone and a tank that looks like an Imperial AT-AT on steroids.  Skroce’s take on future-fashion, both civilian and insurgent, looks different enough to show we’re in the future, but familiar enough to remind us that 2112 isn’t that far off.

Meanwhile, Vaughan remains Brian K. Vaughan, a writer who can take an interesting plot and pepper it with intriguing dialogue.  One memorable moment is a discussion among the insurgents about Superman’s historical Canadian roots, which serves to both flesh the characters out and serve as a Canadian fanboy moment.  I’m not particularly attached to any of the characters yet, but we’re only on the first issue and hopefully they’re further developed into people we can care about as this story continues.

So to my Canadian friends and family out there: Happy Canada Day.  I hope we can all take this story as a good bit of fun and that the great U.S. invasion of Canada remains forever fiction.

Rating: Four and a half bowls of poutine out of five.