My friends have all disowned me, but I still stand by my love of Alpha Flight, Canada's top super-team! It was one of the first comics that really hooked me on the genre, when I was a kid. I just remember seeing this ad for issue 12 - 'one of these heroes will die!' - and it really shocked me (can anyone find a picture of that online?)! Would it be Marina (she looked so worried!)? Everyone looked too cool to die. Of course, it was Guardian - the LEADER!!! - who died. Shocking. I'd never seen anything like that before in a comic.
John Byrne was at the height of his game when he was writing that comic - and he also wrote some spectacular stuff on Fantastic Four at the same time. All the characters were so unique, the villains were just awesome (Pink Pearl! Gilded Lily!) and I have to say, I learned so much from the whole thing (how to build subplots etc). In fact, if you're enjoying my O Men, there's probably a lot of sub-conscious Alpha Flight stuff in there!
Of course, the poor team has suffered several blows over the years. No one seems to know what to do with Aurora and Northstar, Guardian has died too many times to count (including that farcical Unlimited X-Men appearance where he dies and then the whole thing ends with 'oh he's okay, we brought him back to life'), and volumes two and three of the comic were pretty abysmal.
And now of course, half of them were dead - killed by Brian Michael Bendis! That was so nasty - just killing them off for 'effect', and I'd even go so far as to say that I think Bendis may have done it to piss off the ever-controversial Byrne.
I just hope that they come back eventually - characters like Puck and Shaman are way too iconic to stay dead, and Heather (one of my all-time favourite characters) and Mac are too heavily involved with Wolverine's past to stay dead.
In fact, i was watching Ghost Rider last night (meh) and thinking...Alpha Flight: The Movie...?
6 comments:
Will you be checking out Omega Flight?
www.alphaflight.net/cover_gallery/af1_12.jpg
I too was a fan of AF's first run for many of the same reasons that you give. And I loved Heather as a character and the Heather-Puck dynamic. However, I think the AF concept was/is doomed to failure thanks to the Canadian superteam tag. Too often writers feel compelled to Canadianise the stories/characters, and all they can come up with to do that is some variation on some distortion of some Indian-First-Nation-Native-American deal. It's like having a Welsh superteam and thinking that the only way to make it Welsh is to lift every villain from the pages of the Mabinogion. :-)
yeah, jamie, and look what wales did for torchwood.
i'll check out omega from the freebie pile - i prob won't buy it (to be honest, i hate scott kolins' art). nice to see talisman back, but i dunno why sasquatch is being left out of the promo shots. i kinda like spiderwoman, even tho she is a bit dull (she never seems to do anything except have a young daughter)...
AF always had this mystic concept about it - really dynamic and deadly, and sadly over the years the writers just have totally missed the tone.
I think it's more of a case of look what Torchwood has done to Wales :-)
I'm with you on this, Martin, the Byrne run was inspirational - glad to see it finally getting collected in big glossy trades.
yeah totally. an 'Essential' would be nice tho. Or, even better, an omnibus, like that giant xmen one - with all the letters pages and stuff! (swoon)
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