Originally Posted by
rplass
Here's something nifty to read. All typographical errors from the original are meticulously preserved, just for kicks.
Originally published in Marvel Age #2, May 1983.
Alpha Flight by Patrick O'Neill
At times, it seems as though John Byrne's career at Marvel has consisted of taking over characters created by others . . . and turning them into fan favorites: Power Man/Iron Fist, the Fantastic Four, and of course, the X-Men. But it was in the pages of the X-Men that Byrne designed his own superhero team--Alpha Flight. And now, as Byrne prepares to debut the Canadian heroes in their own book (first issue scheduled for release in May 1983), we talked about Alpha Flight--who they are, where they come from, what they'll be doing.
MARVEL AGE: Who are the members of Alpha Flight?
JOHN BYRNE: I may be making this up a we speak--
VINDICATOR - James McDonald Hudson, unemployed engineer. As of the second issue, his name will be Guardian, which is the name he had when I first created him. We don't have the Guardians of the Galaxy to worry about anymore, so he can have his real name back. I never cared for "Vindicator" anyway. As far as I'm concerned, Canada doesn't have anything to vindicate.
He's married. His wife is Heather McNeil Hudson. His battle suit, as Chris Claremont dubbed it, works almost like an artificial Magneto. It gives him localized control of the electro-magnetic field of the earth. This gives him the ability to fly, and to lift objects by negating gravitational effects. It also gives him the ability to render himself at rest, relative to the turning of the earth, which is how he does that disappearing trick of his, by suddenly taking off westward at a thousand miles an hour.
He's about the most straight-laced of the group, the most straightforward. He was the main mover and shaker behind the creation of Alpha Flight, so the apparent disbanding of the team at the end of their last X-Men appearance, and at the beginning of their own title, obviously hit him harder than anyone else. He's kind of a reluctant superhero, though; he didn't really want the job himself. He'd rather be behind the lines. He doesn't see himself in that role, but he does the best he can in it.
SASQUATCH - Walter Lankowski, biochemist, biophysicist. He was a professor at McGill University in Quebec the first time we saw him. He has since moved back to British Columbia, which is the province he is from. He now teaches at Simon Fraser University. He got through college on a football scholarship and played professional football for a while.
He got the way he is, deliberately, when he decided to see what would happen if the conditions to which Bruce Banner was exposed were done under more controlled circumstances. So he built himself a gamma-ray generating machine way up north and bombarded himself with gamma rays--much the same way David Banner did in the Hulk TV series.
MA: Why isn't he green?
JB: He's orange because there was a particularly high sunspot activity at the time, so he picked up some cosmic rays, as well. He got zapped by the Aurora Borealis, basically.
SHAMAN - Dr. Michael Twoyoungmen, physician. He's the chief staff doctor on the Sarcee Reserve Hospital, outside of Calgary. Basically, he is a man who has returned to his heritage. He went off and learned the white man's science and tried to live the white man's life. And, much like Doctor Strange, he discovered there were things in this world that you simply cannot deal with from that direction. He went back and learned what his grandfather had always tried to encourage him to learn--the ways of the medicine chief. He became the second most powerful medicine chief ever to come along, the first most powerful being his grandfather, who is now dead, and who still communicates with Shaman in times of great need.
If you want to sum it up . . . he's Doctor Strange--but he does it with potions and herbs and little dolls and stuff, instead of just doing it with the power of his mind, the way Strange does. This possibly gives Shaman a slight advantage, I don't know. If he had the tools at hand, he can make just about anything. I don't know if Strange has that kind of power over the physical world.
NORTHSTAR - Jean-Paul Beaubier, ski champion and AURORA Jean-Marie Beaubier, teacher. They are twins, who were separated shortly after their birth, when their parents were killed in an automobile accident. Out of their remaining relatives, there was no one who could reasonably take on the task of raising both children, so Jean-Paul went with one group, and Jean-Marie went with another. Jean-Marie would up being raised and educated in a Catholic school by nuns, while Jean-Paul ended up being raised in a much more open and free environment--so their personalities were molded very differently. They did not know about each other until Hudson discovered them. Independently he discovered this fast lady, and this fast guy, and realized they were related when he brought them together.
The first time they shook hands they discovered the additional power they didn't know they had-the blinding bright light they can generate.
They are mutants--and as the fans will discover in the first issue in great detail, Aurora is not a very healthy lady, psychologically. Jean-Marie and Aurora are tow very different people. Jean-Marie does not like Aurora at all. She looks upon Aurora as something that possesses her.
MA: That's interesting. There's no real physical transformation. Just putting on a costume changes her personality?
JB: Yeah. She turns into another person, altogether. And Jean-Paul is very worried about that.
SNOWBIRD - Anne McKenzie, RCMP officer. She has the ability to turn into any arctic beast, which covers a lot of territory. There are a lot of animals that are native to the far north. If she changes into something which would ordinarily be smaller than she, about 108 pounds. She generally turns into a 108-pound version of that thing. For example, if the turns into a rabbit, it would come out as a 108-pound rabbit. If she turns into something larger, like a polar bear, she picks up the extra mass from somewhere and becomes a full-sized bear.
We're saved from explaining where that extra mass comes from-since Snowbird has the advantage of all sorts of mystical stuff to back her up. We don't have to worry about physics. Snowbird is not a human being. As established in the first issue, Anne McKenzie is no more her true form, and Snowbird is no more her true form, than are the beasts she changes into.
She is a half-breed, at best. Her mother was Nelvanna, a goddess, and her father was a mortal. As I'm now creating the story, her mother is imprisoned in a realm beyond our comprehension. On a special occasion, she was able to break out of her confinement, without powers, and mate with a human--in order to have an offspring who would have powers; although those powers are not as great as a goddess's. This was a desperate attempt to get a force into the world that would almost equate with Nelvanna's , which is at least temporarily removed from the world. Nelvanna, by the way, is a "real" Eskimo goddess. We're doing real mythology again.
MARRINA - no other name. She's an alien, although she doesn't know that yet. I don't want to talk about her overmuch-because issues 2,3, and 4 are almost totally concerned with who and what Marrina is. Her powers are that she is a water breather. She's amphibious-she can exist on land, as far as I'm concerned, permanently--she has no "one-hour" weakness, or anything like that. One other trick she can pull-she is able to swim underwater at great speed and twirl around, and thus generate a kind of vortex, so that when she breaks the surface, it creates a waterspout, which can be used to carry her great distances. About three miles, we've established that as a limit.
Other than that, there's nothing spectacular about her. She'll be there mostly for the strangeness that goes with who and what she is.
PUCK - Eugene Judd, bouncer. A normal man, in the sense that he doesn't have any superpowers. Abnormal, in that he's three-foot-six and weighs about two hundred pounds. The analogy I'm using is that he's a six-foot-six man from whom three feet have been edited out. He's about as broad as he is tall. He is a super-fighter-trained in kung fu, savate, and anything else that comes along. He's real good at it. He's called Puck because of his tendency to do cartwheels and spin around rooms, and crash into things. He wears a black costume with a "P" on the chest.
MA: Where do these characters come from? What is the whole genesis of the group--and what direction are you going to take with the series?
JB: OK--genesis: that depends on how far back you want to go.
MA: Go back as far as you want.
JB: Two of them started as fan characters, back in the before-time, when I was in college. Vindicator started as a character called Guardian, as I've said, who looked a whole lot like Captain Canuck--who had not yet appeared. So when Vindicator finally appeared in the X-Men he had to have this costume completely ravamped so he wouldn't look like Captain Canuck. And Snowbird started as a villain in a humorous strip that I was doing for the college newspaper at the time. She sort of got reformed, got a new costume and a whole new raison d'etre, and took off from there.
The rest of them were created more or less to be counters to the X-men that they were going to have to fight. I put in Sasquatch because we needed a big strong guy to go up against Colossus, and I put in Shaman because we needed a weather controller to go up against Storm. He was originally just a weather controller, and his powers just sort of spread out as the story happened. The twins, Northstar and Aurora, because of Nightcrawler's teleporting powers, and everybody having flying powers, we needed somebody who could fly and could move fast--and I thought twins would be fun. I hadn't really worked with twins before, and at that point I'd forgotten that Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are twins.
So, two of them go way back . . . and the rest happened almost as I drew that first issue they appeared in. Especially Shaman--I didn't know anything about him until I actually started to draw him.
MA: What about the new characters?
JB: Well, the two new characters came about then I decided that the thrust of the book would be a kind of "Mission: Impossible" set-up. Vindicator would pick whoever was suitable for the mission. I decided that since they weren't all going to be cosmic missions, and they weren't always going to be going up against Doctor Doom, we'd need at least one character who was just an ordinary guy. And I also decided that since the rest of the group was more or less representative of the provinces of Canada (or at least the regions of Canada), I needed somebody from the Maritimes. I decided to make that one a water-breather.
The were also created to expand, to give me a greater pool to draw from. Eight characters is easier to juggle in a "Mission: Impossible" situation than six.
MA: So the direction of the series will be along the lines of Mission: Impossible. Are they still going to be connected to the Canadian government?
JB: No, they're completely independent now.
MA: Then how does Vindicator choose the missions?
JB: He's centrally located and he has an unofficial/official government liaison, who when something does not present itself obviously to Vindicator, this guy will serve to call up and say, as he does in the first issue, "Check the CBC News. There's something happening here," or "We'd sure like it if you guys would take a glance at thus-and-such a thing." And then Vindicator will pick whoever is suitable for whatever mission and off they'll go and fight the bad guys.
Beyond that, for all intents and purposes, they're simply working out of Vindicator's living room. I establish in the first issue that he has a computer set-up that he sort of boot-legged for himself so that he could get into contact with Alpha Flight, the other members, whenever he needs them. It'll go from that. I hope every issue won't be a case of Vindicator saying, "Come and do this." Since each of them has his or her own life, off wherever it is that they are, it's obvious that just as big bad guys come to the Hulk, big bad guys will come to Sasquatch. He doesn't have to work through Vindicator. That will just be the basic premise. In emergency situations, I can just say, "OK--Vindicator will call them in on this," but they will also have stories that happen just to themselves.
MA: When you were developing the whole concept of Alpha Flight, for their original guest shot in the X-Men, did you think that, being a Canadian, you wanted to do a Canadian team?
JB: It wasn't my idea. Way back, when I first started on the X-Men, they had been kicking around the idea that the Canadian government had probably spent an awful lot of money on Wolverine, especially if he had adamantium bones. It would seem logical, then, that he couldn't just pack up and leave, as he'd apparently done. In fact, I think Len Wein, right from the start, was planning on doing a story where a Canadian superhero would come and try to get Wolverine back. So when I took over the X-Men, it just seemed natural that this story should finally happen, now that there was a Canadian working on the book.
We got sufficient popular response, and I certainly enjoyed creating Vindicator enough, that when the opportunity to establish that there were more than just him presented itself, we took it.
MA: Do you expect to get more public and press response to Alpha Flight in Canada-as there was when Prime Minister Trudeau made a cameo in the X-Men?
JB: There has not been a great deal of response to Alpha Flight in Canada, as far as letters or reactions at conventions. The major positive response has been in the United States, which is what I think inspires us to give them their own book. If it were going to be a smash hit only in Canada, it wouldn't be worth it. I think the group's real popularity lies not with Canadian fans but with American fans, possibly because they are, I don't know, slightly exotic, being Canadian. That's foreign, and therefore out of the ordinary, to the American fan. I don't deny that we're trying to stimulate that same kind of response we had before. I do have a one-panel, throwaway flashback to Trudeau in it, just to see if we can get people looking at the book again. I'm hoping that if it is noticed, there will be a popular reaction--possibly in the press--but, hopefully among the fans in Canada, to the fact that there's now a regular Canadian book. I just hope it won't be expected to be too definitive, because I'm making a comic-book version of Canada, just as the United States in Marvel Comics is a comic-book version of the United States.
MA: Will there be X-men cameos and guest shots, to help attract that fan segment to the new book?
JB: Very, very briefly. There's a two-panel flashback. The first issue does not take place now. It takes place immediately after Alpha Flight's last appearance in the X-Men . . . in Marvel time, a couple of months ago . . . in real time, five years ago. So there's a flashback to what happened only a week ago as far as Vindicator's concerned, to their battle with Wendigo. Nightcrawler and Wolverine will appear, but only for two panels. The second issue catches us up to "regular" Marvel time . . . and we are planning in the future on trying to get Wolverine to come and stay with the group for a while.
MA: You will be responsible for writing, pencilling and inking Alpha Flight as well as Fantastic Four, not to mention scripting The Thing. How will you be able to handle all these art chores on a monthly basis without losing quality?
JB: I'm going to be eliminating a step--I'm going to be doing just breakdowns and then inking those--pencilling with ink. I've reached a level of comfort with my own work that I don't need to do full pencils. So I'll just be doing stick figures, layouts, and inking those. It sounds like a lot of work but it actually isn't. Although (evil laugh) I'll still be making just as much money because Marvel pays me for a completed page.
MA: Why did you decide to spread out the homes of the various Alpha Flight members?
JB: It just seemed to me that in a country as vast as Canada, it would be highly unlikely if all the character started in Ottowa, let's say, or in Toronto. To spread them out simply seemed more logical. Since Canada is so very strongly regional--the west is the west, Quebec is Quebec, and the Maritimes are the Maritimes--and they all have their own very distinct identities, it was logical that the characters should represent those identities. Someone like Sasquatch, if for no other reason than the name, should be from somewhere out in the British Columbia area, where they supposedly have Sasquatch. Some of them have to be French, obviously; and as I said, in the new version we felt the need to have somebody from the Maritimes, so I came up with Marina.
MA: What is the type of adversary Alpha Flight will be coming up against?
JB: In the first issue, they battle a mystical earth-monster called Tundra, which is this walking land-mass. It's sort of one with the land so that if they destroy it too quickly, the whole country will fall apart around it. In issues two through four we are crating a kind of Doctor Doom for Alpha Flight--a character specifically created to fill that role, called the Overlord.
Beyond those guys, I'm hoping to bring in some of the more familiar villains from the Marvel Universe. Also, as we go along, the personalities and powers of the characters will suggest the kind of villains they should fight. Obviously we're not going to see Puck up against the Hulk, anymore than we'd set Sasquatch against Paste-pot Pete.
MA: A question I've had since the team's first appearance: Why are they called Alpha Flight?
JB: They're called Alpha Flight because there are also a Beta and a Gamma Flight. What we had is Department H, which was the superhero-developing arm of the Canadian Ministry of Defense. Alpha Flight are the guys out in the field. Beta Flight are the ones at maximum training, almost ready for Alpha Flight. That's where Puck and Marina come from. And we have Gamma Flight, who are the ones who are under development. In issue one, we get a good look at Beta Flight and Gamma Flight--but we don't tell you anything about any of them.
The reason they continue to be called Alpha Flight is: As they're all standing around at the end of the first issue, saying, "Well, if we're going to stick together, what are we going to call ourselves?"--Puck basically grabs Hudson by the throat and says, "Listen, I busted my buns to be in Alpha Flight--I wanna be in Alpha Flight!" So they agree Alpha Flight is a reasonably good name.
Text of Marvel Age #2 interview with John Byrne
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