Technolandy

Day 155 (of 2025/26) Highlighting Comic Con: Jay Odjick & KC Oster

Superheroes.

For many people, that is still the first mental panel that flips open when someone says “comic books.” Capes. Masks. Giant sound effects exploding across the page like fireworks in a blender. 💥

And honestly? There is a reason those stories endure.

Superheroes are rarely about invincibility. They are about vulnerability wrapped in courage. About ordinary people trying to carry extraordinary weight without collapsing under it. About identity. Responsibility. Fear. Hope. Community. Loss. Justice. Belonging.

The cape is often just camouflage for the human stuff underneath. Movie makers don’t need to worry about new scripts – put to film Kingdom Come, Brightest Day Darkest Night, All Star Superman, The killing joke, Sinestro Corps Wars (yes… I am a GL fan from way back… like underoos becoming a Halloween costume back…) Red Son… hmm, why are these incarnations, much like my t-shirts so DC biased??

That is part of why graphic novels continue to evolve as one of the most powerful storytelling mediums in schools. Works like Ducks or graphic reinterpretations of classics like Lord of the Flies continue to push back against the outdated idea that comics are somehow “less than” traditional literature. Sequential art can tackle trauma, identity, colonization, anxiety, language preservation, and joy with a kind of immediacy that sometimes hits harder than prose alone.

Still… superheroes matter.

Especially when students finally see themselves inside those stories.

I was thrilled when my comic-book-librarian daughter messaged me insisting that I had to get Kaboom! into our school comic collections. There is a particular urgency in recommendations from your own kids. They arrive less like suggestions and more like tiny lightning bolts. ⚡

Then I realized it was the new series from Jay Odjick.

That immediately grabbed my attention because I had a wonderful conversation with him at last year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival. I was already deeply impressed with how his earlier work, Kagagi, was being used not simply as entertainment, but as a vehicle for preserving and sharing Algonquin/Anishinaabe language and stories. The work expanded into animation and audio adaptations, becoming something larger than a comic series. It became cultural continuity in motion.

That matters.

For years, superhero stories have acted like modern mythology. Every culture has stories about protectors, tricksters, monsters, transformations, and people discovering strengths they did not know they possessed. Comic books simply gave those archetypes new costumes and speech bubbles.

But for too long, many kids had to borrow someone else’s mythology to imagine themselves as heroes.

Books like Kaboom! help change that.

They create mirrors instead of only windows.

And for schools, that distinction matters enormously.

Because sometimes literacy growth begins when a student finally sees a hero who speaks like their family, reflects their community, understands their humour, carries their history, or navigates the same tensions between worlds that they do.

A reluctant reader will climb mountains for a story that feels like it belongs to them.

That is one of the reasons I am so excited that Jay Odjick (and KC Oster by extension) will be part of our Comic Con experience.

Comic Con in schools is never just about fandom.

It is about storytelling legitimacy.

It is about giving students permission to love reading in unconventional ways.

It is about art and writing and identity colliding together in a glorious nerd-nova of possibility.

And yes… sometimes it is also about superheroes.

Not because they can fly.

Because they remind us that people can matter.