While earlier examples of Canadian comics tend to imitate American and British examples, over the course of the 20th Century, Canadian cartoonists have cut out niches of their own, as in Hal Foster's pioneering adventure comic strip work on Tarzan and Prince Valiant;[1] in Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse, readers follow the characters as they grow older and deal with a variety of issues, unusual for the gag-a-day comic strip world of the latter 20th Century; Dave Sim's Cerebus tackles epic-sized themes over the course of a 6000-page, self-contained story, while providing new publishing models in the forms of self-publishing and graphic novel collections.
John Wilson Bengough and his Puck-inspired humour magazine Grip (1873–1892) was a popular forum for political cartoons in the earliest decades following Canadian Confederation in 1867.
[2] At the start of the 20th century, Albéric Bourgeois brought what may have been the first continuing comic strip to use word balloons to Canadian newspapers when he created Les Aventures de Timothée in 1903.
In 1938, Toronto-born artist Joe Shuster, along with American writer Jerry Siegel, released Superman to the world, kickstarting the fledgling comic book industry while popularizing the superhero genre.
Chester Brown had a broad influence breaking taboos in his Yummy Fur series, and was part of an autobiographical comics trend in the 1990s that included Seth and Julie Doucet.