Alpha Flight #1-5

Alpha Flight #1-5

Originally released in 1983

Written by John Byrne

Art by John Byrne

As it's Canada Day, I thought I'd switch up my usual pattern by focusing on Marvel's premiere Canadian superhero team, Alpha Flight. (Though that's not saying much, as I'm pretty sure they're Marvel's only Canadian superhero team)  Originating in Chris Claremont's run on X-Men, the team was something of a pet project for John Byrne, who wrote and drew this series. (while also doing his best to boost Wolverine's popularity - Wolverine was a former member of Alpha Flight)

Alpha Flight is a government-managed superhero team, or at least they were - the team is shut down almost hilariously abruptly at the start of the first issue.  Still, the individual members (along with some back-up members who were called into action) agree to keep working together at a team regardless.  Despite being an X-Men spin-off, the team seems to take more inspiration from the Avengers.  Personality-wise, the team leader Guardian seems more like Cyclops (he doesn't have a life outside of the team, though he is married to a redhead), but seeing as his costume is a giant Canadian flag, he's kind of like a Captain America equivalent.

Walter Langkowski, a.k.a. Sasquatch, studied gamma radiation, which led to him being able to turn into the large hairy mammal that he shares his name with, though unlike the Hulk, he is actually in control of himself, so maybe he's closer to She-Hulk or Beast in that regard.  The team also has a brother and sister duo, Northstar and Aurora, and like the Maximoff twins, he's fast while she's unpredictable. (in Aurora's case, she has a split personality)

Snowbird is a shape-shifting demigoddess and daughter of the Inuit goddess of Northern Lights, while Michael Twoyoungmen (a.k.a. Shaman) is a surgeon and mystic.  Rounding out the team are the newcomers: Marrina is a fishwoman who was found and raised by a Newfoundland family, while Puck is a short and aggressive man who doesn't seem to have powers beyond sheer determination.

The series does a good job with balancing most of these characters, though Marrina leaves the team by the end of the fourth issue.  The villains are more of a mixed bag.  Tundra is a big physical threat, and visually impressive (looking like a large chunk of the Canadian wilderness came to life, with the size to match that wilderness), but it doesn't have much characterization.  Meanwhile, the Master Of The World (a caveman who was experimented on by aliens and given a seemingly immortal life as a result) seems to be the team's arch-enemy from what I recall of some of their later appearances, though he feels like a copy of DC's Vandal Savage without doing anything interesting with the caveman concept (at least not in these issues).

Byrne's art is great, and he does a good job at covering various regions of Canada within the team, though there's at least one issue that I have with his writing.  At the end of some issues, we get backstories for the members of Alpha Flight, with Guardian's covered early on.  In it, James Hudson (the man who would become Guardian) discovers that his boss is planning on selling the suit that Hudson had designed to the U.S. military.  Taking the only prototype, he destroys the data that he had collected so his boss can't build another one.  His boss's assistant, Heather, is sympathetic to his plight, though she essentially blackmails him into marrying her for her to have a legal reason to keep quiet.

The bigger problem with that is that she's only seventeen at the time, while Hudson is portrayed as quite a bit older.  It feels like an unnecessary and more than a little creepy inclusion that could have been left out without changing anything.

Aside from that small part, I had a good time with reading this, with Puck and Sasquatch being the highlights for me.  Issue 5 focuses on Puck almost exclusively after he was left out of issues 3 and 4, and it being a solo story rather than a team affair gives him more time to shine as a result as he focuses on a drug-smuggling ring that's tied into the hospital that he's staying at.  For a Canadian team that leaves out the best-known Canadian Marvel characters (Wolverine prefers being on the X-Men; Deadpool wouldn't exist for another seven or eight years), it does pretty well with crafting an entertaining story that seems to take inspiration from other Marvel teams while still feeling original.