Posted: 05 April 2020 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | 1
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Posted this earlier today on the FB group Byrne Victims, and it resulted in some interesting discussion. I hope this doesn't get me banned!
So, what is it about Alpha Flight?
I've often found it interesting that so many people love John Byrne's work on Alpha Flight. Yet he personally was not especially fond of the the series. He has explained on several occasions over the years that he only created the characters to be able to survive a fight with the X-Men, he never intended for them to carry their own series, and that he only agreed to do an Alpha Flight book once Marvel told him that they would be getting their own title, with or without him. He's admitted that he feels like he spent over two years struggling to find interesting things to do with the characters, and that he finally left after only 28 issues when he felt he'd just completely run out of ideas.
It sort of brings to mind Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was famously vocal about the fact that from a certain point on he was only writing Sherlock Holmes stories to pay the bills, and that he felt the character was distracting attention from his much better, more serious literary works.
Since we have a large gathering of John Byrne fans here, I thought it would be a good opportunity to ask what is was about Alpha Flight, the characters and the series, that appealed to so many of us.
Yeah, I said "us." Yeah, I like Alpha Flight, too. To answer my own question, it's because they are such freaking offbeat and quirky and dysfunctional characters, most of them had really interesting and unusual designs, and their series was the most unconventional "team" book you could probably find being published by Marvel in the 1980s. Well, all that, and I thought the Master of the World was a really good, solid, underrated villain. Plus it felt like the various locations in Canada were really exotic and different, especially as 90% of Marvel's characters lived in the vicinity of New York City.
Oh yeah... as a kid I was like "Why did he kill Guardian?!?" But as an adult I end up saying "They should have kept Mac dead!"
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