Reviews

[Phil]

ComiX-Fan

[DelBubs]

That was kind of alright , I don't know why, but I expected something scathing.

[Puck]

Heavy traffic

[nightcrawler]

tis a sad sad world we live in....sad but true

[DelBubs]

ComiX-Fan

Silver Bullet Comics


===============================================
"I'll never quite understand why they would bring back a title and fail to
include the cast members that the fans of the previous series would enter
this series hoping to find. It becomes even more curious when one realizes
that this is the second attempt at reviving Alpha Flight, and one could
argue that the last series struggled to find its audience because most of
the cast was made up of completely new characters, and the members that were
carried over from the original series were sporting personalities that were
so different from their established personalities that they might as well
have been new characters. "

===============================================

Del

[Puck]

both interviews were interesting, hoo hah

[Phil]

X-Axis

I know what you're thinking. Alpha Flight?

Well, uh, yes. I'm a little uncertain about it as well. But Marvel say it's an X-book this time round, even though it wasn't on the first two occasions. And undeniably, it was an X-Men spin-off - even though it was long-established as an unrelated comic years before the concept of an X-book even emerged. So if Marvel say it's an X-book, it's an X-book. To be honest, it's got a better claim than Sentinel.

Anyway, this is the first of five new ongoing titles being launched this month - the others being Captain America & The Falcon, Iron Fist, She-Hulk and Cable/Deadpool. So that's four books which have each been cancelled twice before, plus a second monthly Captain America title. On top of which, Marvel is once again just kind of dumping them on the market as an undifferentiated glop. It's Tsunami 2, kids! Place your bets now on when they get cancelled! Will it be issue #10, or will they make it to the dizzy heights of issue #12?

Then again, most of the Tsunami X-books bucked the trend by surviving, which tends to suggest that the X-books still have the ability to draw at least a mid-size audience. So Alpha Flight and Cable/Deadpool may yet stand a chance - though I have my doubts that Alpha Flight is really going to be embraced as a proper X-book by anyone. To the extent that it even has a fanbase, it's a discrete one.

Scott Lobdell returns to Marvel to write the book, with art from Clayton Henry, who was the "regular" artist on Exiles for, ooh, not long enough to count. In his editorial, Lobdell makes a rather awkward attempt to sell Alpha Flight as a good idea. "There are just some comic book ideas," says Lobdell, "that are just so cool that every kid who has read a comic book ever in the history of the medium will - at one point or another- sit down with a pencil and paper and invent his or her own version of that concept!" And one of those, he says, is "The Team Composed of Heroes from a Single Country."

Of course, we all know the tragic error of Lobdell's theory. "They're all from Canada" is not a thrillingly cool idea, nor is it really a particularly interesting one. In fact, unless you actually have something to say about Canada, or you really want to make use of the country as a background, it's not much of a gimmick at all. And for the most part, the fact that Alpha Flight are Canadian has been more of a curiosity than anything else. It's an accident of history, resulting from the fact that they were created to tie into Wolverine's origin. No disrespect to Canada intended, but let's face it, Canada is not a drastically alien country. It's basically a saner version of the USA, with added French people.

This is why, traditionally, nobody has played the "national hero" angle heavily with Alpha Flight. John Byrne simply tried to make them work as characters (and later gave interviews admitting defeat, saying that they were simply too one-dimensional to carry their own series). In the last series, Seagle played off their government-sponsored status and did paranoid mind-control stories. None of this, really, had a great deal to do with Canada, any more than the West Coast Avengers were uniquely Californian.

And in reality, Lobdell doesn't go for the national identity angle either. Instead, he goes for the comedy angle, with a tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating approach. It's an approach that worked very well on Formerly Known as the Justice League, and there's certainly a market for it. I'm not entirely convinced that it's what the Alpha Flight audience wants to see - if I was looking for an out-of-print team to take this approach, it would have been the Defenders - but hell, why not?

Unfortunately, for the most part, it's not all that funny. There are a couple of decent jokes in there, to be sure, but at least as many that fall flat. Sasquatch is, for some reason, putting together a new Alpha Flight team. So he's going round trying to recruit Canadian heroes, and failing, for the entire issue. Fair enough. But it just doesn't work to have Sasquatch gives the "world that hates and fears you" speech, and be turned down. That's the X-Men's line. If Cyclops was trying to recruit mutants with that speech and failing, that would be mildly amusing. When Sasquatch does it, the joke is completely out of place and doesn't work.

The new characters are a mixed bunch. The 96-year-old recently emerged from a coma is actually a promising concept. There are some possibilities in the new Major Mapleleaf, whose appalling costume and gimmick reflect the fact that he's not a superhero at all, but somebody who does presentations about the Mounties to schoolkids. But the new Puck is just a generic sassy female, and Yukon Jack is a dreadful misfire - Lobdell is so busy sniggering to the reader about what an awful idea he is, that he inadvertantly convinces.

The art is patchy. It's fairly attractive taken as individual panels, but there's a definite lack of flow in parts of the book. Henry has a nasty habit of cutting repeatedly to reverse angles in the middle of a scene (check the pages with Sasquatch and Nemesis for a particularly good example).

It's not as bad a title as some of the reviews would have you believe, but it's certainly far from successful. In theory there's nothing wrong with the approach Lobdell and Henry are trying here, but the book misses the mark noticeably.

Rating: C

[Phil]

The Fourth Rail

ALPHA FLIGHT #1
"You Gotta Be Kiddin' Me! 1 of 6"

Not Recommended (2/10)

Alpha Flight is one of those perennial fan-favorite teams that never seems able to really support an ongoing series, but they get a revival every few years anyway. Mind you, part of the reason why this team can't sustain a series has to do with the utter failure of most creative teams to figure out what makes the characters interesting. Certainly the decision to put Scott Lobdell, one of the worst-regarded Alpha Flight writers in history, onto this revival, is puzzling. The decision to make Alpha Flight a comedy book is even more puzzling. The result, unsurprisingly, is a horrible mess, failing not only as an Alpha Flight relaunch but even worse, as the comedy book that it's supposed to be.

The higher-ups in the comics industry, like every other entertainment industry, seem to have this idea that the best way to relaunch a cult favorite or nostalgia property is to change everything that people have a fondness for about the property. Fans who were waiting for an Alpha Flight relaunch were hoping to see their favorite characters again, to see their stories continued, not just to have another title called Alpha Flight in their collection. Lobdell builds his new team around Sasquatch, and includes one former Alpha Flight villain, but generally has decided to craft an entirely new team for the book.

Of course, this kind of thing can work as well, but the first issue isn't off to a good start. Sasquatch is out of character as a hapless doof wanting to put together a team (at a stretch, in a comedy vein, you might make this work with one of the Vindicators or Guardians, but it's never been what Sasquatch is about.) The other characters include a character named Major Mapleleaf doing a riff on the Tick-like overly sincere boy scout, a beastmaster in the vein of Tarzan or Aquaman, a villain being pulled in under duress, a sassy and sexy bartender and an old retired hero with no real desire to come back. Or, to put it in one word, cliches.

In terms of art, Alpha Flight is also not really spectacular. Clayton Henry's work is starting to take shape, and this is much more impressive than his Exiles work, but it's still somewhat plain and yet over-exaggerated at the same time. Henry's storytelling in general is much improved in these pages, and the overall style reminds me somewhat of Ed McGuinness, but he has a tendency to push the exaggeration too far (Nemesis's busty anorexic look is pretty weak, for example) and almost all of his backgrounds are pretty sparse.

Lobdell used to make his living as a standup comedian. I say this not only to give a little background, but because really, if you read Alpha Flight, there's no way you'd ever guess it. The operative phrase with these gags is "trying too hard" with a touch of "out of date pop culture references" thrown into the mix. Forget about the hoary old gathering the team plot and the dream sequence, which is rarely if ever a good idea. Alpha Flight fails not only to recapture the magic of any of the older series, but it fails to hit its stated new reason for existence. It's not even remotely funny. And really, making fun of Canada should be like shooting fish in a barrel. But tagging "eh" onto the end of every sentence, for instance, doesn't really qualify as insightful and witty commentary on Canada.

[Phil]

Fanboy Review

Score: 3/10

I truly hope Marvel doesn’t think that this is going to appeal to its Canadian readers, because if every one of them is not offended down to the last man, woman, and prepubescent child, I will be shocked. Instead of giving Canada a supergroup they can respect and take pride in, this does nothing but make fun of them.

Then again, maybe they’re already dismissing Canadian readers. Maybe they’re counting on the desire of the American public to read a good Canadian joke or two. If that’s the case, they better come up with something better than the “eh?” cliche. As I’ve said before, and recently, I’m not one to get annoyed by cliches as long as they’re done well. Well, done well, this ain’t.

Not that I have a problem with humor in my costume dramas. There are a couple of moments where I was genuinely entertained, but they were few and far between. There were moments, brief glimpses, where this made me think of Agent X. In the end, however, that just made it worse, as I only thought of how this fell short. The problem, as I see it, is that Lobdell passes up the real comedic opportunities for the cheap ones. For instance, Sasquatch is observing Major Mapleleaf talking to some kids at a school. Some security guards ask him what he’s doing, thinking he’s a pedofile. Immediately cut away to another scene with a quick joke about a body cavity search.

Aside from the fact that Sasquatch would never allow anyone to probe his anus, this situation had so much potential that was just overlooked. How great would it have been to see Sasquatch and Major Mapleleaf going toe to toe because the Major mistakes him for a kidnaper? Now, hero fighting hero over a case of mistaken identity has been done before, but mistaken for a pedophile? I would have loved to see Sas try to talk himself out of that one while fending off an attack. Instead, Major Mapleleaf is in the background the entire time, completely unaware of the situation.

I guess they had to save room for the joke about the Major’s name. Assuming your idea of a joke is something along the lines of, “Do you think you could change your name?” “Why?” “Nevermind.”

[Ben]

yah, I've been seeing a lot of mediocre, to bad reviews. The common thread for people are that they are sticking in for the first story arc, and if they aren't grabbed by then, they are dropping it. Here's hoping we get some good excitement, and character development to keep the current readers, and attract new ones.

[PWalk]

Wow those reviews umm... yeah.

I say we all collective call Marvel next Tuesday and volunteer our services to write the series. We'll all get credit and we'll do it the right way.

[HavokThePowerful]

Wow I didn't know most reviews are murdering it

I perosnoanly liked it!

[mvranas]

UGO/SlushFactory

Alpha Flight #1 (Marvel Comics)

Grade: F

"...I'll tell you right now that you shouldn't buy this book. It's lousy. It's really, really lousy, as a matter of fact."

Wow, with friends like these...

M.

[DelBubs]

UGO/SlushFactory

Alpha Flight #1 (Marvel Comics)

Grade: F

"...I'll tell you right now that you shouldn't buy this book. It's lousy. It's really, really lousy, as a matter of fact."

Wow, with friends like these...

M.

Slush Factory have some nerve, someone wants to review their ****ty site and ask why they think they have the right to review anything.

Hi 'mvranas', attacking the message, not the messenger

Take Care

[Ben]

well, there is an email link at the bottom for commets on the article. Perhaps all who take offence should air the fact.