Pride Month at the Giant Box of Comics and the 40 Years of Comics Project!

At an Ally Conference workshop a few weeks ago, the question was asked how one can make it known that a space is safe for Trans people, and more generally for queer people. The response was "We look for rainbows." Hence the flag up there.

I recently went to the opening night of the Fairytales Queer Film Festival here in Calgary. My good friend James heads the team that runs this festival, and it's an amazing, week-long celebration and remembrance of all things queer. The highlight, I think, of this year's festival, is a film that was produced by the festival itself called Outliers: Calgary's Queer History, a fantastic documentary chronicling the struggles of the community from the 1960s through to the 2010s. James, in introducing this film, rightly called those interviewed, some of whom were in attendance, heroes of the community. And I was struck by the appropriateness of that label. I think a lot about heroes, how we not only define who is or is not a hero, but why we do it, what need it fills within us to see individuals as somehow bigger than life. Perhaps it's that we like to imagine that in the right circumstances, we could all rise to be heroes. Much as these people did over the last 50 years.

Leaving the theater, I was inspired. The result (or one of them) is this month-long project of reading, thinking about, and blogging, some comics that either explicitly or implicitly explore ideas of queerness. I was chatting with my wife yesterday about the ways our criteria for attractiveness are formed by media exposure (you know, just a breezy little afternoon chat), and we at some point started talking about queerness, and how we can think about the process of queering. I tried to boil it down to the deconstructive practice of dismantling binaries. And though the term queer is most often associated with ideas surrounding non-heteronormative practices, we can queer just about anything. It's all about that deconstruction of binary opposition, and the introduction of ideas and practices outside of that dichotomy. So this is how I'm approaching the comics I'll be reading this month - as comics that introduce a queerness to an art form that has become a very important vehicle nowadays for queer voices.

The oldest comic I'll be looking at this month is an issue of Real Girl from 1992. We'll start in the indies, where there's a much longer history of queerness, but then get straight (see what I did there?) into the mainstream of the 90s, a moment when explorations of gender and sexuality were being presented in a fairly high-quality format. Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo's Enigma, from Vertigo Comics in 1993 and also on the reading list this month, is a great example of this. Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, and his glorious follow-up The Invisibles, are explicitly queer, bringing this perspective, through Doom Patrol, to the larger DCU, though it would take a couple more decades for this queerness to touch much more than the DP's strange corner. And we also shouldn't forget the tale of Northstar, a gay man right from the get go, but one who was not only closeted in his narrative, but also narratively closeted, in that the story never explicity says "Northstar is Gay!" At least, not for about 100 issues of Alpha Flight.

Time allowing, I'm also hoping to get a few other bits of writing up this month that aren't specifically reviews for the 40 Years project. I'm not sure what they'll be about yet. Perhaps just some thoughts on my own experiences of queer comics, how they've inflected and changed my own collecting and reading practices. But Summer is Summer, and it is always very busy. No promises!

I went back through the entries of my "40 Years of Comics Project" to look at the previous posts that have touched on ideas of queerness. Given the scope of the collection, there's not that many, though perhaps more than I might have expected. You can have a look at them all here, though fair warning that some of the posts only touch on the queerness in the comic briefly. In my posts this month, I'll attempt to be more eloquent.

And if you have any thoughts on what you read here, I'd love to hear from you. Talking about comics is absolutely one of my favourite things in the world to do (my superpower is stating the obvious), so please, chime in if you'd like.

Happy Pride, all. Let's read some comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 772: Alpha Flight v.1 #30, January 1986

One of the things I'm finding interesting about the last couple of issues is that it's early work by Mike Mignola, predating Hellboy, I think. You can see the stark difference between Mignola's personal style and his inked style here as the cover seems to be his own work, whereas he's inked in the interior pages. And, if I'm to be very honest, it just doesn't look like his work inside. It looks kind of...you know, usual. Which, of course, an artist starting out at Marvel would want to be. Gotta make sure you can cop to the house style. I'm supremely grateful, though, that he decided to pursue his own style and stories, and that we have the brilliance that is Hellboy as a result.

Scramble, the Mixed Up Man, is a villain of Lovecraftian proportions, bringing a heaping dose of body horror to the Great White North. The creatures we see within remind me of the Famileech from the New Universe titles, and you can see in their depiction on the cover there Mignola's interest in things Lovecraftian, an interest that gets taken up in much of his later work. For a great example, see the wonderful The Doom That Came To Gotham Elseworlds series. So good.

One more Alpha Flight tomorrow, then on to something a bit different. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 771: Alpha Flight v.1 #29, December 1985

We're going to spend a couple of days with Bill Mantlo's Alpha Flight, and then, on Sunday, I'll be starting a project within the Project that I hope is interesting and thought-provoking. But until then, let's see what the Alphans are up to under new management.

As with most passings of the reins between creative teams, there's a fair bit of tidying to be done from the previous team's tales. Today is one such bit of tidying, as the team faces off against the Hulk in the streets of downtown Vancouver. To put this slightly more into context, the creative team that has taken over the book was actually previously working on the Hulk's book - the back matter of the previous issue notes that the two books, The Incredible Hulk and Alpha Flight, literally switched creative teams. Completely. Even the editors switched roles. So it's no surprise that, as Mantlo and company take over the Canadians, they do so with a little epilogue to their work with the Hulk. By issue's end, he's back across the American border, and the Flight decides not to pursue him. They may technically have won the battle, and ousted the Hulk from the city, but at the cost of being quite badly wounded.

What the battle accomplishes for the team, though, is to solidify it as a team. One of the running themes, especially since Guardian's death, has been the coherency of the team. I mentioned earlier in my look at Alpha Flight that I kind of liked the way that the team wasn't really a team, a "non-team" almost in the mold of the old Defenders title from the 70s. Much of Marvel America is centralized around New York, though we see more and more teams being located in various cities around the country. But the dearth of heroes in the Great White North means that the team has to traverse vast distances to assemble. I liked that about them. Canada is fricking huge. For those who've never been here, we are the second-largest country in the world. And lots of it is pretty empty. The closest major city to Calgary, where I'm currently residing, is Edmonton, a 3-hour drive away. And that's actually pretty close.

I know that the team is likely to relocate to the old Langkowski manor that was the site of Gilded Lily's plans earlier this week, but I don't know when. And what does that mean for Northstar, who obviously has a life in Quebec, literally on the other side of the country? We may find out in the next couple of days, but perhaps not. Something to look forward to when we get back to the Flight, I guess. Oh, and I was mistaken when I said that I didn't have a coherent run after Byrne's departure. It actually looks like I have much of Mantlo's run as well. Groovy.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 770: Alpha Flight v.1 #27, October 1985

Wait! What?! Guardian was an imposter? It's actually the robot Delphine Courtney? And Omega Flight have taken out most of Alpha? I guess you can miss a lot in those 20-odd pages from last month. Well, except that, as I predicted, the Marvel summary machine works very well, so I don't feel lost at all!

We get to see, today, the inside of Shaman's medicine pouch, which looks very much like Byrne doing his best Steve Ditko Dr. Strange impression. Byrne, in a lot of ways, combines features of the two major Marvel originary artists, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, so it's appropriate to see something of an homage to him in this issue. I'd have liked to see more, but the needs of the story, apparently, override my desire for psychedelia! Who knew?

Sorry, I'm in quite a bit of pain today, and I can't really think of much more to say. We'll keep on with the Alphans for the time being, and we'll make some headway into Doug Moench's run on the series, though not in quite so coherent a fashion as Byrne's.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 769: Alpha Flight v.1 #25, August 1985

But who is it? Whose silhouette (negative silhouette?) is that on the cover? Can you guess? As I have a look at my database, I see that we're coming up to the last few issues of John Byrne's run on Alpha Flight, so the stops are being pulled out, and the horrible events of a year previous seem to have been reversed. Seem to have been, that is. It's Guardian, for those who aren't in the Alpha Flight loop. He famously returns from the dead in this issue with a strange story of having been thrust into the past and to the moon Ganymede, there to befriend some strange creatures who help him get back to his own time and place. It's moments like this that I kind of wish I had the rest of the story. I'm missing the next issue, and then number 28, which may is Byrne's final issue and a Secret Wars II tie-in, which means it's already on the list. Now that I think on it, that means I'm only missing 4 issues of Byrne's run on the title. Incoming writer Bill Mantlo is credited in this issue with "Creative Kibitzing," which I think may be the first time I've seen acknowledgment of the an incoming writer laying groundwork for their run on the series. I imagine it must happen a fair bit (I seem to recall something about Grant Morrison and his desire to kill off most of Paul Kupperberg's Doom Patrol), but it doesn't get credited that often. Nice to see.

What else? The team starts to get into Northstar's potentially terrorist past, though that's interrupted by their departed leader's return. Talisman manages to take out a supervillain all by herself, proving that she really is as powerful as everyone seems to think.

So, next issue is apparently a rematch with Omega Flight. Let's hope that the 80s Marvel tradition of having at least two pages of recap per issue is being upheld, so that I can read #27 without too much trouble.

To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 768: Alpha Flight v.1 #24, July 1985

The end of the second year of the title closes out the "Great Beasts" storyline as the Alphans travel to another dimension to rescue the soul of Walter Langkowski, and battle the last of the beasts. Snowbird fulfills her purpose on Earth (we should all be so lucky), and the team seems to have cohered in a way unlike their previous gatherings throughout the series. Though there is still much of the American superhero comic to Alpha Flight, there's also much of that is different. I made the comparison to Doom Patrol yesterday, and I think that a lot of that similarity is tied to the fact that we're seeing characters that no only are super-powered and thus more than human, but are also deeply flawed, and deeply disturbed by their experiences, which makes them very human. I was chatting with a friend about this very thing, the Marvel aesthetic of being unable to decide if their characters are gods or humans, and the fine line they tread in treating them as both. It makes me think back to the levels of story that Frye discusses in Anatomy of Criticism. Superman, ur-hero, is obviously the mythic hero, superior in kind to his fellows and to his environment. He chooses not to be, on occasion, but he still always is, Kent or no. The Marvel characters are created to straddle the line much more actually, in that they don't just show the qualities of both god and human, but embody them in a way that the DC characters often don't. Which is fine, of course. These difference of mythic aesthetic is what makes the characters and stories great.

We'll see, though, if the team is not a little more US-styled in its composition, whether or not the comic itself manages to maintain that quality that is setting it apart from other Marvel team titles of this era. I'm thinking, of course, of the X-Men and Avengers titles that are concurrent with this one. Avengers, of course, is large-scale superheroics, as they always have been, whereas the X-titles at this time are more allegorical. Alpha Flight, I think, if it bears resemblance to anything in the Marvel U at this point, it's to Goodwin's original Squadron Supreme, in that it deals much more explicitly with the consequences not just for the world, but for the weilders, of superpowers.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 767: Alpha Flight v.1 #23, June 1985

There's something a little bit different about Alpha Flight. They're not really a team, as far as I can tell. They're a bunch of people trying to be a team, but not really being the sorts of people who should be on teams. I'm not sure if that makes sense. They're a bit like the Doom Patrol, in that sometimes they just don't even seem to like one another, but something keeps them from drifting apart.

And, man, do they die a lot. Today it's Walter Langkowski's turn. It seems that his beast form is actually one of the Beasts that Snowbird has been tasked with defeating. Which she does.

I'm sadly coming to the end of my sustained run of the title. From here on there's occasional gaps, and then once we hit the mid-30s, it's bits and pieces of the rest of the series. It will be interesting to read these brief glimpses into where these characters go, having gotten to know them a little bit at the beginning of their time as superheroes. I know the Flight are now backing up Captain Marvel in the new Marvel U, so it's nice to know that, in some form, Canada's contribution (well, other contribution) to the Marvel U is secure.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 765: Alpha Flight v.1 #22, May 1985

Aaannndd....no Diablo. Ah well. I was kind of looking forward to some alchemical shenanigans.

The roller coaster ride that is Aurora/Jeanne-Marie's split personality continues, as she spends 3 days flying across Canada in a bikini to escape from Walter "Sasquatch" Langowski. Having lived through a few Albertan winters now, I can safely say that that would be a horrendous experience.

What's really interesting about this comic is that it delves into a shadowy chapter (one of them, anyway) of Canada's past, bringing up the spectres of the FLQ and the problems that beset Quebec in the late 70s. The case of the FLQ becomes more relevant with each passing news report from the US arguing the difference between foreign and domestic terrorism. The FLQ were, no doubt about it, domestic terrorists, utilizing violent means to get across their agenda of a separate and sovereign Quebec. What we find out in today's issue (though it may have been revealed earlier, I can't remember) is that Northstar was involved with such a group in the days before becoming a member of Alpha Flight. The movement for a separate Quebec, which continued well into the 80s and 90s, and still surges every now and again currently, is something I've never really been able to wrap my head around. I kind of love that my country has so many distinct and proud cultures - the shame of it is that we seem to have trouble celebrating all of them as much as the European settler cultures get celebrated. Canada without Quebec would be so much less than what it is - and exactly the same goes for every other culture that's a part of our country, be they ones that came after the initial settlers or, more importantly, the ones that were here before. Being an idealist is so disappointing sometimes.

To be continued.

(Oh, yeah, the bad guys in here were like a Canadian version of the Circus of Crime. Kinda blase.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 764: Alpha Flight v.1 #21, April 1985

I thought, as I wasn't sure of what to read next, that perhaps it was time to jump back to the beginning of the collection and recommence my alphabetical read-through. It's been a while since I last read Alpha Flight, and I know I was getting cranky with it near the end there. But it's been almost a year since we last looked in on our Canadian representatives in the Marvel Universe. First things first, the battle up there on the cover never happens in the comic. Diablo only appears in flashback, back to the 1800s, so definitely no interaction with Sasquatch or Aurora. Maybe he'll come along next issue? I didn't even notice his absence from battle, as the story told a really nice little period piece about the origin of Gilded Lily. (SPOILER ALERT) I was sorry to see Lily crumble to dust at the end of this issue, as her story laid out a fascinating origin, and her steampunk-y aesthetic once revealed was really cool.

More Alpha tomorrow, I think. though I'm coming up to the parts of the series where my coverage is spotty, so expect crankiness when I can't follow the story. Or just in general. I'm cranky these days.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 408: Alpha Flight v.1 #20, March 1985

As we creep into what looks like a set-up for a haunted house mystery, we're going to take a break from Alpha Flight for a bit. I can feel my ire rising, as I've noticed happening numerous times when I've spent too much time with a particular series. Which is fine, really. I don't mind leaving things on a cliffhanger (as this issue does!), and I think I'd like to get into the later letters of the collection and see what's in there.

What also appears to be happening in Alpha Flight is a consolidation of the team, potentially out on the West coast. I'm not sure how I feel about this. The dispersed nature of the team was one of the things I quite liked that distinguished it from its American counterparts. Shaman's ability to teleport would surely have made short work of the distances between members in an emergency situation, so the only reason I can see for putting the team in one place is to allow writers to engage with the soap opera-ness that similar team books of the time (New Teen Titans, Avengers, X-Men) demonstrated. Which is a pity, as I don't see this series having much in common with those others, and I quite like it that way. These are not necessarily friends - they are team mates, work friends, so to speak. I don't need to see how they react to one another socially.

Well, we'll see how that all works out once we return to Alpha Flight. For now, we'll move on, and see what else is hidden in the depths of the collection. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 407: Alpha Flight v.1 #19, February 1985

For the life of me, I cannot figure out who ever thought that high heels as part of a superhero costume could ever work.

I almost feel like that's all I want to say about this issue. There's a neat time-travel story, the introduction of Talisman, and a nice little dedication to the City of Calgary in celebration of its centennial, but not much substance to the story. Considering the antagonist was one of the SEVEN GREAT BEASTS!!!!, it goes down fairly easily.

And again, high heeled superhero costume.

Well, I've said it before, and I will undoubtedly say it again - they can't all be winners. Though I did crack a smile when reading the last word in this issue:

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.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 405: Alpha Flight v.1 #17, December 1984

Back to Alpha Flight, though, really, we're going even further back to The X-Men, and "Weapon Alpha"'s first attempt to recover Weapon X.

Let me say that the thing that struck me the most about this comic was the insane amount of dialogue. I mean, we're talking Kevin Smith levels of word bubbles, chock full of prose, and crowding the characters out of their own comic in some instances. It's a tough line to straddle, though. You want there to be action, but action can't be all there is. Ask Image in the 90s. Plus we're witnessing a team dealing with the sudden death of its leader, so it really is mostly going to be talking, figuring out what comes next. Much like any of us after a traumatic event like this. Wolverine comforts Heather, and then he and Puck convince Ms. Hudson to become Alpha Flight's leader. Which I was thrilled to see, because here's the thing: this series is growing on me. I've missed reading these characters, even if they are occasionally long-winded and hyperbolic. They're superheroes from the 80s, pre-Dark Knight and Watchmen, pulling on the prime time soap opera aesthetic that was ridiculously popular at the time. They deal with their darkness not through psychosis, but through connecting and disconnecting with the people around them. Again, much like any of us.

Next issue's cover has Heather holding the Guardian battle suit up to herself in front of a mirror. I'm quite excited to see how she becomes the Vindicator we all (well, some of us, anyway) know her as today. More tomorrow!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 395: Alpha Flight v.1 #16, November 1984

As we close up the Lake Ontario "ripper" story arc, I think we'll bid adieu to Alpha Flight for just a little while. As I mentioned yesterday, I haven't grown cranky with it, so let's leave off on a high note for now.

I'm pretty happy to see that Byrne hasn't totally succumbed on this series to the inevitable guest star (hero or villain) ploy that seems to be de rigeur in comics. We haven't seen Spider-Man, or Captain America, and when Wolverine has shown up (once in a dream, once in reality), he's uncostumed, there as a visitor to a friend, rather than a hero averting disaster. He's also given the Alphans, in the form of The Master of the World, their own arch-nemesis, and aside from the Sub-Mariner's presence in the last couple of issues, the Canadian super-team seems to be somewhat isolated from its southern neighbours. This offers an interesting perspective on the internationality of this shared universe. We often see superheroes simply drop into a country, solely on the basis of the threat being one that only superheroes (and, um, only American superheroes?) can stop. But the lack of crossover into Canada from the US heroes here demonstrates that, though these characters may occasionally see themselves as being above, or outside, of the law, that some international laws do appear to be respected in the Marvel U of the 1980s. Sadly, this highlights the very North American-centric perspective of superhero comics that persists even to this day, but it also demonstrates an era of superhero comics in which the heroes weren't deities that could traverse the globe willy-nilly, but instead people, citizens of a country, who still respected the laws of their land.

Mostly.

Okay. I think tomorrow we'll delve into the weird and miscellaneous depths of the collection. Stay tuned!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 394: Alpha Flight v.1 #15, October 1984

I think the most exciting thing that happened to me on the shores of Lake Ontario was strolling down Bronte pier hoping to find a hook-up for some weed. Nothing like what's going on in this comic. Because I'm missing a number of the early issues of the series, I'm not sure what the deal is with Marrina, aside from what I've read in her various Handbook entries - the nice thing is that this is a comic from the 1980s, which means it has an almost-ridiculous amount of recap every 4 pages or so. I always thought that this over-exposition was a symptom of Chris Claremont's writing, but Byrne partakes of it too, so maybe it was editorially required at the time. Either way, I get a "reminder" of previous events, and don't feel quite so lost.

There's a moment in this comic where Marrina finds a cavern beneath the waters of the lake, and as she makes her way down it, she becomes trapped as the passage narrows to a width too small for her to pass through.

I am quite claustrophobic. I hate being on elevators, and even an enthusiastic hug can make me uncomfortable at times. And every time (every time!) I see a seen like this, be it in comic, television, film, wherever, I have to squirm in my seat to get through it. I know it's an unreasonable fear (mostly), but there it is. It does bring up the interesting notion of the experiences we bring with our readings. Someone who doesn't feel this way about enclosed spaces would certainly not have the affective response to that scene that I did. It's one of the things I love the most about imaginative literatures, that there can never be a reading of them separate from the reader - a literary observer effect, perhaps (though I've been warned repeatedly away from conflations of literature and physics by some academics - I wonder why they fear novelty so much?).

Strangely, I'm not getting tired of Alpha Flight, after almost a whole week of reading. More tomorrow, then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 393: Alpha Flight v.1 #14, September 1984

Ah, nostalgia.

Not that I have ever been pulled beneath the waters of Lake Ontario by a 40000-year old alien life form.

There's a scene in this issue where Heather and Puck are strolling along through Ontario Place, the Cinesphere in the background. I remember doing this as a young boy, with my parents and brothers. I'm pretty sure my Mum and Dad still have the caricature we had done of me up on their wall somewhere. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I, unsurprisingly, said a superhero, and thus was immortalized with a giant, caricature-head and little tiny Superman body. It's still what I want to be when I grow up.

Of course, then the scene shifts to Calgary, and the excavation and recreation of Fort Calgary, a project that is still ongoing today. And my nostalgia shifts to a fondness for my current home. I'm not sure if it's the identification with the country or the stories themselves that are starting to pull me in (much like Heather up there on the cover), but Alpha Flight is finding its footing. I don't know why I should be surprised by this. It often takes a series a few issues to figure out where it's going. And, finally, I'm quite interested in tagging along.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 392: Alpha Flight v.1 #13, August 1984

In one of my earlier reviews of Alpha Flight, I commented on Byrne's ability to tell a story using only captions and panel layouts - I've since had it suggested to me that he did it because he was behind on a deadline, but, as will all things comics related, I choose to be an optimist. In this issue, he does the reverse: standard panel layouts and no dialogue for the funeral of Guardian.

(Huh. Do we say it's the funeral of Guardian or of Mac Hudson?)

And just as I was impressed with the silent (from a pictorial standpoint) section of "Whiteout," so too was I impressed by the silent section of today's issue. There is a long-standing rhetoric surrounding the Holocaust during World War 2 that sees it as a tragedy that is simply too large to put into any words that human beings might have. I've often thought that the death of a loved one, of a husband, wife, child, sibling, parent, is of a similar colour. How does one speak such a tragedy?

This comic is growing on me just as it ceases to be a standard superhero comic. I've always considered Alpha Flight to be a Canadian knock-off of the Avengers, but that just isn't the case. They're not a team in the same way. They strike me more as an emergency response unit - the vast majority of Avengers comics feature the team somehow being all in the same place (whatever super-clubhouse they're in this month), having a chat or a drink, training, etc. But Alpha Flight, in many ways, don't even seem to like one another, let alone have a shared space to be in. There's a verisimilitude there that I quite like. You don't always have to like the people you work with in order to work well with them. And it's this that gives the comic a bit of an intriguing angle.

Hopefully it'll last. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 391: Alpha Flight v.1 #12, July 1984

What is it about comics from this era? "AND ONE SHALL SURELY DIE!" (I wanted to add a couple of exclamation marks after that title - one hardly seems sufficient. I wonder what it was that spurred such hyperbolic language - X-Men comics of the era were similarly scripted, same with Secret Wars and Avengers. Marvel really went for the unbridled, and unapologetic, melodrama in the early 80s.

Byrne has long had this strange association with the Doom Patrol, though I'm not certain why. His reboot in the early 2000s was almost universally decried, but aside from a couple of covers, I can't think of any other reason to link him to the series. That said, the interactions between the members of Alpha Flight in this issue hearken back to the Drake/Premiani run of Doom Patrol, in that the team bickers and fights amongst themselves almost as much as they fight supervillains. Though every single one of the team members has acknowledged that their signal device would not have been used if the situation weren't dire, they all take the time to have a bit of a scuffle. And if Aurora had had her way, there's a good chance she and Sasquatch wouldn't have come (well, to the meeting, anyway) at all.

So what do we do with the death of Guardian? As one of the most prominent Canadian superheroes of the time, especially as a character spinning out of the X-titles, killing off James Hudson is a bit like killing off Steve Rogers - and while that has been done at least a few times over the decades, Canada, especially Marvel U Canada, doesn't have that many patriotic heroes to spare. Then there's also the problem of Byrne basically illustrating a flag-burning, which I think, again had it been the star-spangled Avenger, might have raised a bit of ire. Looking at this moment from the future, it's a little less affecting than it might have been at the time - remember, this is before the resurrection of Jean Grey, before the Marvel U began pulling characters back from death left, right, and center. It used to be a cliche that if a supervillain "died," you never believed it until there was a body. Well, even with superheroes if there's a body, death is not necessarily a certainty. However, at the time, it must have been a bit of a shock - Guardian is the longest-standing character in the series, leading what basically amounts to a team of rookies. Where does his death leave that team? I guess we'll find out tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 390: Alpha Flight v.1 #11, June 1984

Before I get back to reading through the BIONICLE comics, I thought I'd delve into the unread portions of my collection again, and pick up Alpha Flight where we left off over a hundred days ago. I'm still not a fan, let me just be clear about that, though it is nice to see Canadian superheroes written with the same aesthetic as their more famous American counterparts. One of the things we wrestle with as Canadians is figuring out our national identity - we tend to define ourselves not by what we are, but by what we are not, and very often that hinges on not being American. I think this comes not so much from an impetus to decry our southerly neighbours, but to clearly delineate ourselves in the face of being only one of three very large countries that occupy this continent. Mexico has a much longer and richer history and culture, America has (and please understand this as a compliment) a much louder one - where does that leave Canada?

As I noted in my last post on this series, things are getting weirdly American in the treatment of the superheroes on Alpha Flight, and I'm not entirely certain where such a thing is going. But I'm going to give John Byrne a little more credit than I usually do, and make some suppositions about this series. It's interesting to me that the series has, at this point, divided it's narratives in a number of ways. The more obvious division is the use of the back-up origin stories, which is certainly not an unusual device in superhero comics. But Byrne has also divided the team in contemporary time, and is telling stories about individual members - sort of an odd choice to make within the first 12 issues of a series. The book is titled Alpha Flight, after all, not Members of Alpha Flight (I'm thinking here of the difference between titles like The Avengers and Solo Avengers). While I think there's definitely some rhetoric going on about the necessity in such heroic circumstances of teamwork, I think we're also seeing a particularly Canadian take on superheroes, very similar to the more contemporary Canadian Corps. We're a country that is, in some ways, very much more regionally diverse than the United States, and part of that diversity comes of the vast disconnects that can take place across the space of a continent (not to say this is not the case in the U.S., but I think Canada, in its founding, strove more for the diversity than for the melting pot). So emblematizing this in a Canadian superteam means having the characters maintain that diversity, rather than, as with the Avengers or the X-Men, gathering them all together in one place and homogenizing them.

Okay, spoiler alert here, though it's for a comic that's 32 years old, so deal with it. The other commentary that's happening here, which is linked to the above, is, I think, quite a bit more political. Guardian notes, as he flies in to rescue his wife at the World Trade Center, that he's put out the call, that the rest of Alpha Flight will soon be on their way, ready to do battle in that battleground of battlegrounds, New York City. But what happens to this team when they're all called together to fight, like a good, ol'-fashioned superteam? Their leader dies. Guardian's death, though I think it may have been retconned a number of times, was one of those occurrences, like the death of Phoenix, or of Rita Farr, that lasted long enough to resonate, to actually cause lasting change in the fictional universe. Heather Hudson's decision to take up the role of Guardian/Vindicator signaled a major shift for the team, and she becomes an important, though still second-tier, female superhero through the 80s. My reading of this tragedy, though almost wholly without support, I admit, is one of recognizing that any attempt by this Canadian team, and more broadly by Canada, to mimic the behaviours of our neighbours will end tragically. Canada may not always know what it is that makes Canada, but we should never make the decision to become someone else.

So, I'm sort of pulled back in now - I'm curious to see if my contentions are borne out, if this comic really does try to think through Canadian identity from the vantage point of the superheroic. We'll talk more tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 233: Alpha Flight v.1 #10, May 1984

What was that I was saying about Marvel New York yesterday? Well, today, James Hudson moves to New York. I guess hoping for a comic that was set in Canada was really too much. The same issue I brought up yesterday applies here as well, as far as travel time (New York is about 9 hours from Toronto), but adds to that issue thoughts of sovereign air space and the crossing of international borders.

Of course, this comic is set well before the uber-paranoid measures that require a passport to get from Canada to the U.S. (For those on the younger side, before 9/11, Canadians and Americans actually trusted one another, and you could use a driver's license to cross the border.)

More troublingly, the conclusion of Sasquatch's tussle with the Super Skrull has him turn into an orange, furry version of the Hulk. Patriotic, flag-wearing hero moves to New York. Rocky Mountain-based hero becomes knock-off of seminal American monster/hero. Bah.

Time to take a break from Alpha Flight for a bit, I think. I'm getting cranky. I'll get back to them in a week or so. I've a stack of old comics sitting on the basement floor that have been in dire need of a read, so I'll pull out a few of them. See you tomorrow!