Bronze Age Baby

Deep Sigh: Worst Fear Realized?

August 2nd, 2008 Posted in Memorabilia, Rereading

First, let me establish my Alpha Flight bona fides: I was a true ‘Byrne Victim’ long before I’d heard the phrase. I’ll talk about my love of his Fantastic Four run here before long. I was all primed for the team’s debut in their own title. Heck, I subscribed and yet was so eager for the resolution of the first plotline that ran out and bought a copy of the third issue before mine arrived in the mail.

Heck, I bought this thing, whatever it is:

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(In case you’re curious, it’s a kind of banner, made out of some felt-like material of all things. Hangs from a dowel rod, about 15″x23″. I have a bunch of these stored away. Marvel must have been the only ones producing them, as there’s no DC or independents.)

You can probably guess where this is going. Brace yourself, because this is going to take a while.

So, Dave O=Alpha Flight Fan. We’ve established that. Nonetheless, when I got done reading Byrne’s run I was pretty dissatisfied. It just wasn’t that good.  Maybe my perceptions were colored by comments by Byrne that I’ve read since, comments to the effect that he was unhappy with it too. They were just a bunch of power-in-suits created to fight the X-Men. Try as he might he couldn’t make them compelling characters. Byrne’s comments can be found here.

Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoyed the art. (Though I’m still trying to figure out just why Byrne’s art captivated me so in my teens.)

     

Okay, so that’s probably another post. (Click to embiggen.)

Anyway, you can feel Byrne searching around for a direction. He did try something new in that he only brought the whole team together occasionally, preferring to focus on solo members or small groups. He also played with some of the conventions of the team-book genre. That was less successful.

The death of a team member is a pretty common ‘event’ in team books. Byrne teased as much in issue 11. Speculation ran rampant as to which member it would be. Most fans reasoned out the ‘who’ by applying the conventions of the genre.

From a letter gleefully printed in issue 15 (That’s three months after the writer had been proven wrong.):

“Look at it this way:

-GUARDIAN: He’s the leader, so right away he’s invulnerable. to kill him would make about as much sense as killing Mister Fantastic or Cyclops. Without him the group will simply fall apart.

-SASQUATCH: We all know Squatch is the most popular member, and even if he wasn’t without him you’d have no super-strong character, and every group needs at least one super-strong character.

-SNOWBIRD: Not this soon after Phoenix. Fandom is still smarting from that death, and you’re not likely to kill any female characters for quite a while. This means that AURORA and MARRINA are safe too, especially Marrina, since your were foolish enough to say that none of the characters were ‘created to die.’ That saves PUCK, too.

-SHAMAN: Why would anyone kill another Indian? That would really be asking for trouble.

So that leaves NORTHSTAR. Too bad, I liked him, but I guess if any of the group has to die, it might as well be the expendable one. His sour personality is matched by Puck, and his powers by Aurora.”

I’m still impressed by how well reasoned that was. So what happened? Well, the following happened.

Issue #12–the issue in which we were promised someone on the team would die–ended with Guardian, the team leader and symbol of Canada, alone, having defeated the villain of the piece. He estimates that he has about ten seconds to dismantle his damaged battlesuit before it explodes. I highly recommend clicking through the image on the left; Byrne does a great job with this sequence, shaping the panels into the numbers of the countdown to build the tension. It’s something you’ve seen a million times and you’re expecting that he’ll pull it off, like James Bond at the end of Goldfinger. But that’s not what happens. Byrne has an ax to grind with genre fiction, it seems. After all, it’s not logical that the hero always wins, that there’s always a last minute rescue. Guardian’s wife, who had been kidnapped and used for bait but has now freed herself and is looking for her husband, wanders into the scene and disturbs him just as he is about to finish his delicate work. The pages were planned very well. The countdown is on the right-hand side so the reader has to turn to page to find out the result.

 

The editors’ response to the poor unnamed kid who wrote the above letter sums it up: 

“You started off with a false assumption, friend. Death is never a logical beast. There is no individual who is “best suited” to die, or “most logical choice” to perish. Life and death are neither particularly logical, and the Death of Guardian serves to underline this. No one, especially not a superhero, can be deemed “invulnerable” either because of their position, or their popularity. When death strikes it strikes at random, and without warning, just as it struck Guardian.”

Yeah, except this isn’t the real world. It’s fiction. One of those crooks’ bullets ought to hit the Batman every once in a while, but you know what? Then you’ve got no Batman. That’s the logic of narrative convention.

The death of Guardian took a fair amount of steam out of the book. Byrne doesn’t own up to any regrets for the decision to kill him, at least not on narratological grounds. He does admit that maybe it was a mistake to incinerate Canada’s answer to Captain America–the guy literally wrapped in the Canadian flag–to prove a point about the arbitrariness of life.

Byrne got bored with the book after another year and handed it off to the creative team that was putting out The Incredible Hulk at the time, Bill Mantlo and Mike Mignola. Uffda! It was enough to make you miss Byrne’s ennui. Mignola was a long way from his Hellboy days, and Mantlo had no idea what to do with the threads Byrne left him. The classic example is Puck.

Byrne had taken pains to set up Puck as an interesting character, one who had lived a full and interesting life, all while being a dwarf. A dwarf with a painful condition called achondroplasty. Mantlo decided that Puck’s pain–and short stature–was because of a demon he kept imprisoned in his body. Hoo boy! 

Looking at my collection I see my interest trail off in missing issues until it stops. 

I’ve put the post-Byrne issues in a pile I’m tentatively calling the “able to gotten rid of with a minimum of regret” pile. Needs work, I know.

So what did work in Alpha Flight? Well, the issues I enjoyed most rereading were the Sasquatch solo issues, #9-10. They’re a kind of ‘closed-room’ mystery where the killer turns out to be -SPOILER ALERT!- the Super-Skrull. As the letter above stated, Sasquatch was probably Alpha Flight’s most popular member. He was essentially a happy, well-balanced Hulk. Plus, to my knowledge he is the only former Green Bay Packer to ever become a superhero. So what did Byrne do? He retconned the character’s origin, made him a mystic Beast of the Inuits’ mythology, and had his heart torn out.

That’s his teammate Snowbird mimicking him in white, about to rip his heart out. (And yes, it’s another one of those banner things.) I know he’s come back in the meantime, but looking at the character’s subsequent history–the subsequent history of all these characters in fact–is just too depressing.

I was a little depressed rereading these books too. Is this what it’s going to be like going through the collection? It was interesting to bring some of my vaunted liberal arts education to bear in looking at these comics again’ with an eye to narrative structure and character design, but I was hoping to recapture some of the pure joy and excitement I felt back in the day. That was markedly lacking. My worst fear seemed to be realized. It seemed like a lot of ado about not much. I resolved to test something with a stronger reputation next time. Something really good.

One more word about the characters of Alpha Flight and then I’ll end this ridiculously long post. It seems no one has known what to do with them since Byrne left. And since he didn’t know either, it’s like no one has ever known what to do with them ever. Appropriate for a group of characters just meant to be some shiny suits that could stand up to the X-Men? I don’t know. It doesn’t explain the fondness I, and apparently other fans, have for the characters. I leave you with a testimonial to that fondness. I’ve never been a big action-figure collector (shut up Bill!) but even I couldn’t resist these little guys when they showed up in stores in the late 90s. They’re super cheap and poorly made, but just looking at them makes me happy. (And makes me say, “Where are Marrina and Shaman?”