NRAMA: Speaking of ramifications of Civil War…Alpha Flight?

That's it… just talk about Alpha Flight. You know the questions on people's minds.

MM: Well, the two big questions are whether Cap flees for Canada and whether I'm writing the Alpha Flight spin-off book. To answer the first, no, Cap doesn’t flee for Canada because that's just bloody stupid and completely out of character.

However, there's some truth in the other rumor floated recently about the origins of the new Alpha Flight team. I pitched the idea to Marvel just as they were preparing a new Alpha Flight book (with an excellent writer I really like) and they were incredibly accommodating, working all my plans into their series and launching the whole thing from Civil War.

I will have zero to do with the book beyond that or setting it up (the writer is too good and too smart to need a paunchy Scots drunk looking over his shoulder), but there's a number of books I'm helping set up in this regard. There's about five at present and I'd love to write at least one of them. I don't know if I'll have time, but as well as the revamps of most of the established Marvel books Civil War will also launch several high-profile spin-offs. These books will be very varied and have some creative teams Joe, Tom [Brevoort], Mike Marts, and Axel [Alonso] are putting together right now and it's incredibly exciting.

"Alpha Flight" is Marvel's on-again-off-again super hero series created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, and originally launched in their own series by Byrne. That series was probably my favourite Byrne work of all time, and it's one I can regularly return to with much fondness. Marvel, time for an Essential Volume, no?

Anyway, since then, Marvel have regularly disbanded the team, banded them again, killed them, brought them back to life, and put them through all sorts of creative and commercial loops before recently killing them all off again. It's part of strategy that will see a relaunch, the new team and status quo being set up in "Civil War" by Mark Millar. So, what's the new twist that will give Alpha Flight that all important edge? White text for the sensitive amongst you.