In 1955, Queen Elizabeth was given the puck with which Maurice Richard scored his record-breaking 325th goal. While in the schoolbook version of history, Canadians tend to go in for heroes in sensible shoes, like Frederick Banting and Alexander Graham Bell, deep down we still hunger for something bigger, an Achilles. We want someone who can turn a hunk of rubber into a magic talisman, an offering fit for a monarch.

Picture books can be a surprisingly fertile medium for big ideas like the true nature of a hero. They leave no room for waffling. Heroism is tricky territory, however. The heroic qualities we celebrate in children’s books reveal so much about our own beliefs and our own uneasiness. The writer for young children has to find an authentic middle ground between gullibility and cynicism.

In The Rocket, writer Mike Leonetti and illustrator Greg Banning, both veterans of the hockey book world, tell the story of Andre, a hockey-playing kid who suffers from the misfortune of having a highly talented older brother. “As soon as I got the puck, I heard someone say, ‘He’s not as good as his brother.’” It is 1944, and the fictional world bumps up against the real when Andre’s father announces that he has a new colleague at the war supplies factory where he works. It is the young Maurice Richard, already playing for the Canadiens. The second collision between invention and history occurs in the story’s punchline, when Andre discovers that a gifted player on an opposing team is the younger brother of the Rocket.

Banning’s illustrations are pure hero worship. His characters are sculptural, scrubbed, and tidy, with a golden glow as though they’ve been freshly dipped in maple syrup. In this world, everybody smiles and has really straight teeth. While the domestic scenes lack conviction, the visuals really come to life in the depictions of the games, with their sense of the gorgeous physics of moving bodies. At one point, Richard appears to be flying.

Likewise, whenever the story leaves the rink, the text goes flat. Andre’s first-person voice is dull, sounding like a child forced to write a school composition. “It didn’t matter anymore to me what anybody said; if I wasn’t as good as Marcel, that was alright. Meeting the Richards made me really appreciate Marcel. I was proud to have him as my brother.” Much livelier and more convincing is the sports reporter that Andre morphs into during the big game: “But then, just before the period ended, the Rocket drilled in a shot from about twenty feet out for his third goal of the period. A hat trick!”

A more nuanced approach to heroism is embodied in Proud as a Peacock, Brave as a Lion by Jane Barclay. In it, a young boy accompanies Poppa, his grandfather, to a Remembrance Day parade and service. During the preparations for this event, the boy asks about Poppa’s stint as a soldier during the Second World War. Why did he lie about his age to enlist? Was he lonely? Was he scared? Why is he crying? A story emerges from the answers to these questions, one that is both specific and universal. A 17-year-old enlists and is sent overseas. He survives and is decorated, but his best friend is killed. At the end of the day, as a “bugler trumpets his notes up into the cold, gray sky,” Poppa and the boy make a pact to remember.

In Renné Benoit’s pen-and-ink and watercolour illustrations, we are placed firmly in the consciousness of a young child, who takes his Poppa’s turns of phrase literally. Poppa says he was “brave as a lion” and “proud as a peacock,” and so shadowy lions and peacocks accompany the preparations and the parade. Benoit’s pictures also support the understated back story of a lonely widower bravely making do. Her painting of Poppa ironing his shirt is particularly poignant. A palette of sepia and grey splashed with spots of bright red poppies mirrors the tone of the text, a quiet, loving dialogue between the generations punctuated with vividly realized war scenes. (“He crawled on his belly through the noise and the mud and pulled three men to safety.”)

Both these portraits of heroes – one famous, one ordinary – are set comfortably in the past. Nobody mentions Todd Bertuzzi or the controversy over our presence in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, each book makes a statement about heroism. In The Rocket, we’re dealing with the clash of the Titans, an idealized, larger-than-life world of unadulterated physical prowess. In Proud as a Peacock, we get a double portrait of a hero – the echo of an idealistic and naive boy and the melancholy wisdom of an old man.

Both of these tales are admirably virtuous, but the picture book format has other demands. As we turn the pages, read aloud, and study the illustrations, we expect a tight narrative, rich language, a strong story arc, and pictures that extend the text. Given all these expectations, the peacock trumps the Rocket.