Alpha Flight: Ponderings from a relatively new fan of the series.

I’ve been on the Alpha Flight bandwagon for a very short period of time, all things considered. I have met an ‘interesting’ cast of characters (see: fans) who can recite the entire series, every incarnation and nuance verbatim and they just added to my pleasure of the series as a whole. But I am the only ‘newbie’ so to speak, that wants to really talk about the series from a fresh perspective. At least the only newbie I know of, who is willing to open their mouth and say so…now watch them all come out en masse. So the idea behind this column if you’ve gotten this far is this: A fan of Alpha Flight who has known of the series for a fairly long time, but only recently got interested in it, wants to write what she thinks of things in the world of Alpha Flight.

How does someone know about a series forever but only recently hooks up, you might ask? A few things actually…budget being the main one. Also back in the early days of my comic habit, I was an oddity. No woman dared enter the realm of the comic shop to actually shop! The only women you used to see were the girlfriends/wives of comic addicts, and even that was rare. I was a bit leery at first and made my trips inside, short and to the point…actually that’s how I do all my shopping, but this is about comics and Alpha Flight specifically so I’ll stay on track here.

I started out with X-men. Right before the cartoon series of the nineties took off into orbit. X-men was safe, it called to me, and I found it fairly easy to catch up on. The reason the X-books called to me was simple. Mutants! People who are different trying to make their own place in the world! I can name a gazillion things that I find ‘different’ about me from the general populace and it fit. Of course it didn’t take me to long to figure out that mutants lurked in just about every book Marvel put out, including Alpha Flight. But this was the early nineties and Marvel had over a dozen X-books for fans to eat up. And I was a student living in Hawai’i and on a VERY limited budget. Variety didn’t fit into my budget back then.

What really caught my eye to Alpha Flight was an article the Honolulu Star Bulletin printed about ‘Marvel comes out of the closet!’ I think that was the header…and it was front page. The article in question was about Alpha Flight #106 volume 1, the issue where Northstar comes out as gay. Interesting….and sold out before my next trip to the comic shop! Homosexuality is a subject I’m more then familiar with, and something I myself was dealing with at the time…well okay, bisexuality but still. An iconic media like comic books was addressing it and I was intrigued. But like I said, it had sold out before my next trip to Jelly’s and I kinda forgot about it after a while.

Fast forward to 2003 and Alpha Flight catches my interest again. Actually X-Men did, but there was a keen Alpha Flight link in the form of Northstar in the X-books. I had watched my comic book addiction explode then fade due to fundage again…or lack there of. Gotta love unpredictable job markets. I hadn’t been inside a comic book shop in a few years when the X-bug bit me again. I was cruising sites on the net for X-men pages when I noticed that Northstar was now an X-Man. Hello? I read a little further and before I knew it, I wanted to know everything I could about his days in Alpha Flight!

When I first noticed AF back in the day, I knew a few key points. 1) The team was comprised entirely of Canadians. I can get down with that. As a New Zealander myself, I can relate to other Commonwealth countries. 2) Alpha Flight was a government funded team. Hmmm…? 3) They were made up of more then just mutants. 4) Northstar was a first for Marvel as a character. That’s it. Well there were a few other small things like it had been cancelled twice, but eh, anyone who follows the industry publications knew that.

One of the things I found however in my searches was that Marvel had decided to re-launch Alpha Flight! Yay! By then I had found more basic background info on the characters and had found my second love in the world of Alpha Flight. Doc Walter Langkowski…aka Sasquatch. I have a fondness for the science types, don’t ask. I also discovered that the new series was being penned by an industry favourite of mine, Scott Lobdell! I fell in love with his work on Generation X and the characters he created for that series. This made me want to pick up the newest incarnation of Alpha Flight. If Scott could come up with someone as intriguing and interesting as Chamber for Gen X, what on earth could he do to a whole new batch of characters for Alpha Flight? It was also like a solo Sasquatch book for me too in a way. Hey? The bloke with the orange fur coat was the main star along with the new cast.

I was also introduced to the Alpha Waves forum shortly after the new Alpha series had come out and had met a rather interesting and refreshing bunch of comedians there. I’ve done comic book forums before and never found one I liked. They’re all too strict and regulated for my tastes. Alpha Waves was refreshingly different! Not only could I ramble about my latest fandom craze, but I could ramble about other stuff too and not get screamed at. Works for me! They were more then willing to educate me on the finer points of Alpha like no page I could find, would. Hell, even the bloke that runs the forum is aiding me in my thirst for more. He’s also brave enough to let me try this little experiment in comic column-dom.

This is the first of what will hopefully be many columns about Alpha Flight, told from a rather interesting perspective. I have yet to find a comic column written by a relative newbie to a particular fandom. What I want to achieve here is simple: Comic books, specifically Alpha Flight, as seen through new eyes. Cheers! Jo.