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Bachie, overnight, drew up Johnny Canuck, an essentially Canadian hero with no superpowers. But he was strong and bright and patriotic - with a great right hook.
He wore an Indiana Jones leather jacket, goggled headgear and boots. He tracked down Nazis on the home front, and as a spy behind enemy lines.
Long after Plasticman and Spidey took over the comics, in 1996, Johnny Canuck got his own Canadian stamp.
This latest incarnation of our wartime hero, Hurray for Johnny Canuck (from Image Theatre), is the sort of thing a 16-year-old might think up. Or perhaps, it's the sort of cheerful, politically incorrect entertainment that might have been put on in a community hall to raise the spirits of a war-weary population.
It seems too strange a choice for a diversion in 2002.
The story is right out of the old Canadian "black and whites" - during the Second World War there wasn't enough money to print the comics in colour. The characters are familiar stereotypes (all Germans speak with sauerkraut accents) and the jokes have the subtlety of the Blitzkrieg. Mounties break into Rose Marie, there is always a secret back door that leads to Hitler's room so Johnny can confront him and almost stop the war right there, and the Nazi soldiers are such bunglers they make Star Wars' stormtroopers look like Roman legions. (Are these really the guys who conquered Europe?)
This is not a production that is going to tell us much about the indomitable Canadian spirit or what it is to be us.
It's more about trying to squeeze laughs out of a denominator that is the lowest of common.
Brain Copping tries to hold it all together with lines such as "the story thus far ..." and director Robert Loucks comes up with some sporadically funny physical comedy.
I must admit I don't get this kind of humour.
This company is capable of sophisticated fare both dramatically (Orphans) and satirically (Tom Foolery), but there is little that is sophisticated or stylish here.
The opening-night audience seemed to enjoy it a lot.
Hurray for Johnny Canuck, a production of Image Theatre, runs until March 23 at the Jekyll & Hyde Pub. (More: Theatre Reviews).