The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 406: Alpha Flight v.1 #18, January 1985

This is a slightly disingenuous cover. It looks like Heather's going to become Guardian, Shaman's daughter is going to go magic crazy, and Snowbird is going to get...well, either kissed or stabbed in the stomach, as far as I can tell.

Heather finds a suit that goes over the battlesuit. That's literally a condom for the Guardian suit. Shaman's daughter's around, but the person who gets possessed looks absolutely nothing like that silhouette on the cover. And Snowbird gets kissed and then turns into something horrific that we don't get to see, so stabbing in the stomach's not off the table either.

I say all this affectionately. I know that, in past posts, I've dissed our Canadian reps in the Marvel U numerous times. But I forget the first season rule - it applies to comics as well. A comic needs to find its feet. It needs to figure out what works and what doesn't, and jettison that. Last issue we saw the beginnings of the severing of Aurora and Northstar's powers - it was a cute idea, but ultimately unplayable in the setting. Hudson's death a little while ago smacked of a stunt, but I think that the stories that have come out of it, of these characters dealing with their grief has given this title something....dare I say it....Canadian. It's a gentler superhero comic, but no less a superhero comic for it. It still suffers occasionally from "Claremontitis," in which characters' thoughts become litanies to despair, moral dilemmas given thought in a way that no actual person ever could - even their thoughts are super. Byrne muddles his way through representations of Native Canadians, but I never get the sense that the cliches are mean-spirited, just uninformed. Not an excuse, but unsurprising given the decade of its production. I also have to give Byrne credit for placing Heather Hudson in the leadership role of this team - again, relatively forward-thinking for the 80s. This, and Northstar's implied homosexuality, and it's actually kind of surprising the comic lasted 12 issued, let alone the 130 that it reaches.

My friend Garrett loves old school Alpha Flight. I could never understand why. But I think I'm beginning to.

Onward.