Marvel’s Canadian Superheroes Will Bitch To Justin Trudeau About Annoying American Colleagues

He’s buff. He’s charming. He’s smart. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau feels pretty damn close to being a real-life superhero sometimes. So it makes sense that he’ll be showing up in an Alpha Flight-focused Civil War II spinoff story.

An article up on the CBC today details Trudeau’s upcoming appearance in Civil War II: Choosing Sides #5, which is written by Howard the Duck scribe Chip Zdarsky and drawn by Ramon Perez. The story will focus on Alpha Flight trying to figure out its allegiances with regard to Marvel’s latest hero-vs-hero event, which has factions fighting over whether they should use a new character’s precognition to stop villainous acts before they happen. Here’s Zdarsky:

I didn’t want this to just be like a walk-on … rescued by superheroes and he thanks them and that’s the end of the story. I think a lot of these real-life appearances in comics tend to go that way. I liked the idea of him actually engaging them in an ethical debate.

It’s a little tricky just because once you start to put words in the prime minister’s mouth, we acknowledge that this is basically Trudeau fan fiction.

I had to kind of think about where he would stand on something like that and how he would handle it. Hopefully, I did a good job. Maybe I’ll get a call from him saying: ‘How could you have me saying that to … Iron Man?

Appearing in a Marvel comic is now a family tradition. Pierre Trudeau — Justin’s father and a former Prime Minister himself — showed up in Uncanny X-Men #120, demanding that the first incarnation of Alpha Flight bring Wolverine back from America.

Fun fact: That 1979 issue of Uncanny was drawn by John Byrne, who lived in Canada for much of his youth and the Civil War II tie-in is written by Zdarsky, who lives in Toronto. Civil War II: Choosing Sides #5 comes out this August.