those first 15 or so issues of Alpha flight are awesome.
come on, fighting in a snow storm so you dont see any action!!?!!!! totally awesome. take that dave sim for wacky page layouts.
I liked the concept of the Plodex more than the execution. The idea of an alien race that adapts to whatever world it finds itself in, is a pretty interesting attempt to explain why aliens look so human. Otherwise, the Master of the World was pretty much a boring villain with a boring personality and murky motivation; an evil-with-a-capital-e silent film villain, who if created in the sixties, would fit in with the "never used again" category along with Half-Face from TALES OF SUSPENSE and Master Man from FF.
The absolute nadir of the book was when Johnny Redbeard revealed Diablo's heretofore-unknown girlfriend. It was like the best-drawn fanfic in history.
For me, the best Byrne art I've seen was in the AVENGERS ANNUAL when Roger Stern was writing the book, which was in the aftermath of the battle with Nebula, which had the Skrulls locked into their forms permanently. The reason I like this issue is because Byrne did the layouts only, which meant they were power-packed and had the illusion of 3-D, but the actual linework and design, never a Byrne strength, was done by another artist (Guice, if memory serves).
It's like something a fan would cobble together in middle school. Flash clone? Check. Hulk/Thing variant? Check. Waterborne hero? Check. And for good measure, let's rip off Captain Canuck, too.
Jeph Loeb once said that he thought this was the source of the appeal of Alpha Flight: it's an idea that makes everybody feel they can do their own version of it.
Actually, this is kind of true: who, as a kid,
hasn't done some bored scribblings for a hero team that represents their nationality or ethnicity?
And what was Northstar but a poor man's Quicksilver, who in turn was just a so-so Flash imitator?
Ouch, ouch, ouch!
I have to ride to the defense of Quicksilver here, maybe one of my favorite Marvel characters. That's like saying Hawkeye is a Green Arrow imitator. If their skill set was based on another character, they transcended them, as have much more complicated and totally different personalities and totally different appearances and life experiences.
Quicksilver was never a poor-man's Flash. Quicksilver was always his own man: haughty, proud, instantly able to rub people the wrong way, explicitly "European" and traditional-minded, protective of his sister (which kept him 'human' - his sense of family). He started off a villain and became a hero. He was a mutant, and he responded to humanity's contempt with contempt for humanity in return.
And maybe he has the same power as You-Know-Who, but Quicksilver used it in totally different ways. He could, for instance, bounce like a pinball, and his leg muscles have tremendous lifting power: he could lift a car with his legs alone. Pietro never did traditional Flash feats like vibrate.
My favorite moment in Marvel history is when Englehart, in the VISION AND THE SCARLET WITCH miniseries let the cat out of the bag about the company's biggest not-so-secret secret: Quicksilver and Wanda were Magneto's kids. The letters page was absolutely unforgettable. Most of the reaction was something along the lines of "well,
duh!" It was like when Elton John came out of the closet.
