For Death Week: Alpha Flight #12

[northstarfan]

Title: Alpha Flight #12 - "...And One Shall Surely Die!" (Marvel, 1984, 38 pages)
Creator: John Byrne (story and art)
Availability: Out of Print (Really, Marvel, is one volume of Essential Alpha Flight too much to ask?)

Saying that Alpha Flight had a rough time of it in their first year is a bit of an understatement.

To start with, they were cut loose from their government-sponsored status and wound up doing a lot of on-the-fly superheroing while operating out of Heather and Guardian's living room.

Then their teammate, Marrina, went crazy, nearly gutted Puck, and was revealed to be neither mutant nor human, but Plodex, an alien species that makes John Carpenter's Thing look almost cuddly by comparison.

Snowbird's civilian identity in the RCMP was compromised, and she discovered that the Great Beasts of legend were getting closer and closer to breaking through into her world.

Northstar saw his adopted father killed in front of him and managed to drive his sister off immediately afterward.

Sasquatch discovered that his girlfriend, Aurora, was actually barking mad and, at the same time, he was starting to lose control of his temper when in his monstrous form.

Shaman was still in his original costume.



During a vicious attack on Alpha Flight by Omega Flight, Guardian finds himself facing off against a suit of remote-controlled Bochs armor...



Heather is being held in the same complex, and has already managed to free herself.










John Byrne: so very good at turning the screws on his characters.

Now, this was a perfectly good death: dramatic, tragic, and utterly devastating to poor Heather.

And then Byrne brought him back...but not really, it was just an evil robot using the most implausible story ever conceived to explain how "Guardian" managed to survive: he wasn't really burned to ash, you see, he was actually transported to one of Jupiter's moons where an advanced alien race attempted to revive him, but, never having seen a human before, they accidentally incorporated the remains of his suit into his body, which explained why "Guardian" came home with about two-thirds of his skin replaced by mesh circuitry.

Pretty far out there. Utterly ridiculous. The kind of story only a desperate and guilt-wracked loved one could ever possibly swallow.

Guess which story the new creative team used to bring back Guardian for reals. Yeah. That's OK, though, because they blew him up again pretty soon after.

Which only caused him to hop dimensions.

But he eventually came back to Earth and took up work with Department H again.

Who then replaced him with a teenage clone of himself and tried to shoot the original into space.

They missed.

So Guardian comes back and leads Alpha Flight again, and the clone leads Beta Flight until he's killed by Erik Larsen AIM.

Sometime after that, Guardian and Alpha Flight are captured by the nuPlodex and have to be rescued by Alpha Flight 3.0.

Oh, the shame.

Guardian and the original Alpha Flight opt to return a cache of Plodex eggs to their homeworld, and Alpha Flight 3.0 spends a few issues time-traveling via vicious stabbings...

No, I am not making this up. There's a reason the second reboot only lasted twelve issues.

...and eventually they return to the present 616 with temporally-displaced copies of the original Alpha Flight roster. So we have a Guardian in space and a Guardian on Earth.

And then the Guardian on Earth dies of Bendis-plot THE END!


Sometimes "dead means dead" is a very sensible policy.


Suggested tags: title: alpha flight, creator: john byrne, char: guardian/james macdonald hudson, series: week of death

Comments

[zemo]

Is it just me, or is it always the women that go crazy and nearly kill their team? Jean Grey and Wanda Maximoff come to mind too.

[neuhallidae]

There've been times that guys do it, but a very high percentage of those are revealed as mind-control or unwilling mental alteration, whereas most of the ladies seem to fall into "wimmins is jus' crazy". Even Jean was in that category before the retcon of the Phoenix being a different entity. It's really kinda icky.

[akodo_rokku]

Well obviously their fragile female minds can't handle that much POWER! Power is for men, you know.

[proteus_lives]

I'm reminded of the old man from Pet Semetary:

"Sometimes, dead is better."

[icon_uk]

I remeber the death, the return and the reveal. I then remember the wonderfully outlandish, pure sci-fi comic book drivel OTT story of the return suddenly become fact and just thinking "Do you guys just not GET the concept of irony... at ALL!?"

[cmdr_zoom]

Motto to all of the above.

[jlbarnett]

I'm sorry, but death because he couldn't take apart his suit quick enough actually seems pretty stupid to me. The lack of a good return just says to me he shouldn't have killed him in the first place.

[theanswer]

Yes, how stupid can one be if they can't take apart their incredibly advanced high-tech suit whilst their eyes are swollen shut from a severe beating before it engulfs them in flames?

[wizardru]

Well, the real question is: was he about to save himself and ran out of time...or did his wife's arrival distract him at the critical second between life and death? Or was that how his wife would remember it and assume it to be?

I mean, the idea of killing off Vindicator/Guardian by the 12th issue was pretty ballsy. Bringing him back as a fake-out a year later was great. Making the fake-out the reality, though...weak.

Poor Alpha Flight...they really did deserve better than they got. FOR YEARS.

[da_reap]

Frankly, it looked to me like the power pack was going to blow anyway- but Heather came in just when he was about to throw it away and huddle up to save himself, so he held onto the thing to shield her from the brunt of the blast with his body.

*Shrug* Maybe I'm looking at it wrong.

[adamant_ink]

Poor Alpha Flight...they really did deserve better than they got. FOR YEARS.

Cosigned times infinity :(

[northstarfan]

So far as Byrne was concerned, Hudson wasn't meant to come back -- the whole reason for offing him was to eventually get Heather in the role of team leader.

To be honest, I never understood why all the insistence on bringing him back. He had appearances in three X-Men stories and was only in seven issues of Alpha Flight before he died; it's not like the book didn't move along just fine without his vital presence.

[his-spiffyness.livejournal.com]

Right, Heather ended up wearing the suit a lot longer than Mac. She lead the team a long time, and yet they keep coming back to Mac as Guardian.

[philippos42]

Whenever I see one of these Alpha Flight revivals with Mac leading, I just roll my eyes. Another writer who didn't read the original run past the introductory issues.

[icon_uk]

Bear in mind that that wasn't Byrne's intent either. He wanted Heather to lead without using the Guardian suit, and for as long as he wrote the title she wasn't a costumed hero, she was Heather Hudson, kkickass team leader in her own right

After Byrne left it took about an issue and a half for her to become Vindicator, which seemed something of a shame to me.

[adamant_ink]

This. It always bothered me too, because Heather was an awesome leader. To me it reeked of latent chauvinism, like somehow it made writers squirm seeing her strut around as the unchallenged head of Alpha Flight. I hope I'm wrong, but I honestly can't see any other explanation.

Heather as leader was one of the things that made Alpha endearing, IMO. Sure, in US teams, female capes have had stints as leaders (I know Janet got a chance to head the Avengers, and Monica Rambeau led Nextwave) but those were one-offs. I can't think of any female hero who became the kind of iconic figurehead for their team that Heather was to Alpha Flight. For a lot of other superteams, that glass ceiling still exists.

[geoffsebesta]

It's like the helicopter crash in The Life Aquatic; it's so realistic that you just can't accept it.

[halloweenjack]

No, it made perfect sense. Hail Mary passes don't always get caught.

[sir_mikael]

Well that's rather horrible but I'm kinda amused at Heathers "What's behind this door?" Oh just your husband exploding in front of you. Without context it must seem very out of the blue.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Wow, now THERE'S a nicely done out-of-the-blue moment. Every narrative instinct seems to tell you that things are going to be OK - he's beaten the bad guy, he's fixing the problem, he's almost there - then one little distraction, and BOOM! He's a rapidly dwindling heap of glowing charcoal. Nowadays, Marvel would have been screaming for months that CHANGES were about to happen in Alpha Flight, that SOMEONE was going to die and boy-oh-boy doesn't this make you want to buy every issue and extras for your friends - there's none of that here; it just happens, completely without warning and with nothing to cushion the blow. I imagine there must have been a LOT of jaws dropping when this issue first came out. Well-played, Mr. Byrne.

[northstarfan]

I'm sure there was some pushing of the event, but just the announcement that a regular character was going to die was something of a shock to fans, as the book was practically still in its infancy.

And Byrne handled it with his legendary tact . When questioned about who was going to die at a con before issue #12 came out, he responded that it wouldn't be "the Indian or the queer."

*facepalm*

[psychopathicus_rex]

Well, let me put it this way - it took ME by surprise, and I was EXPECTING it, so... yeah.
As for Byrne's statement - bigoted, yes, but... had it even been revealed at this point that Northstar was gay? Could this have been a hint?

[adamant_ink]

o_0 ... Yikes. Moving on...

I could only imagine what it must've been like for AF fans at the time (who were already collecting comics at the time, not a whippersnapper like me who can only look on in retrospect :D). A main character dying after just 12 issues is shocking enough, but killing of the team leader, the guy everyone assumed would be safe? Must have been something else. He is truly a horrible, horrible man.

[selke]

Okay, why did I not read "Alpha Flight"? This is actually neat.

[northstarfan]

Well, it's not like Marvel's kept the series in print or treated the surviving team members with much respect...