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I hate to say it, but...it's the Canada thing, right?

I figure there are two ways of looking at it. Either
A) The team is interesting because it's made up of interesting personalities and powers - in which case, limiting the setting to Canada may be a mistake (and while I know nothing about later characters, that is a pretty snazzy original cast). And Northstar has been flirting with popularity as an X-Man for a few years now, so why aren't a couple of these guys on an Avengers team yet? Not that they would fit into Bendis's stories, but Mighty or Initiative?
That would certainly be a way of promoting interest in the characters, and eventually work towards a backdoor reintroduction to the full team, minus the Canada-centric nature.
OR
B) It's that the team is set in Canada, in which case a complete representation of the book is probably needed - less focus on the team itself, perhaps more focus on how they affect their environment, and how their government/population interact with them.

But as it is - "The Avengers of Canada," as Brevoort puts it - I can see why it's unlikely they'll get anything other than the occasional miniseries. Best-case? Get some top talent on it, so at least they're GOOD miniseries (Dr. Strange by Vaughn or Waid? Not to shabby, right?)

Get the Immonens to do it.

I quite enjoyed Steven Seagle's Alpha Flight run, lots of fun conspiracy stuff. The art was often pretty bad unfortunately.

If they want it to sell, put Wolverine on the team. He's already on a few, so one more isn't really a stretch. Plus, he's Canadian.

Sigh. Why NOT bring it back as a miniseries? As much as I'd love to see an ongoing, at least a mini would get the ball rolling and allow any initial storylines to wrap up. If it does well, bring it back for a "Season 2."

Second...gee whiz, this isn't hard, folks: bring back as many of the original or classic members as you can. It's what people want to read. Sasquatch, Aurora, Northstar, and Snowbird are all still alive and active in the Marvel U. If we want to leave Shaman dead, then fine, use Talisman. Stick somebody in some Box armor and somebody else in the Guardian suit and bam, there's your team. Marinna has been established as being "out there" somewhere and is one of the most annoyingly unresolved mysteries of the Marvel U. And yes, put Wolverine on the team for the occasional guest-stint.

"Second...gee whiz, this isn't hard, folks..."

I think it's more difficult than that. As much as I liked John Byrne's tenure on the book when I was a kid, not even he was quite sure what to do with Alpha Flight.

The Avengers are Earth's Mightiest Heroes. The Fantastic Four is a family. The X-Men are the outcasts who protect a world that hates them. And so on. What's Alpha Flight? "Canadian." The reason I liked the first 13 or 14 issues of the 1997 relaunch is that the paranoia/conspiracy theme relied on more than nationality to make the book distinctive (although, obviously, that didn't save it from cancellation).

so forget about a quality artist/writer trying to do justice to AF (and no, that Lobdell joke was not quality), but no problem to marvel bending over and letting Bendis absolutely destroy a valued team for nothing more than cheap, hacky issue padding. Um, ok, Breevort.

I follow Mr. Brevoort's logic that one of the problems with Alpha Flight is "they're like the Avengers, but in Canada."

Thing is, I'm having trouble working out how that logic squares with Marvel publishing something like 14 different books that ARE the Avengers, but in... the U.S.... like the original Avengers.

I mean, "Dark Avengers: They're like the Avengers, but they're dark," no? Tom? Tom...?

You're way oversimplifying it Wraith. Each of the different Avengers titles have different premises; the Initiative is a government ran group of superheroes in training, the Dark Avengers are a group of psychopaths pretending to be good guys, the Mighty Avengers are the group that takes care of big world threatening threats, and the New Avengers are more street level. Sure, they're "just Avengers" if you just look at the cover and just looking for excuses to hate it just because it's Bendis.

As someone that's only been reading for 5 years I know nothing about Alpha Flight except that they're Canadian. The X-File-esque team of superheroes mentioned sounds good to me whether they're Alpha Flight or not so I'd have read that had I been reading comics at the time. Tell me that that's what the team's concept is and I'd buy a book about it. But that's the first I've heard about what a particular run is about and before then I just knew Alpha Flight as "Canadian." You'll have to do better than that to sell that team to me.

The answer is simple. The original team was quite sucessful until John Byrne left the book and Bill Mantlo seemed to go out of his way to f*** up EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of the team, slasher-style.

Northstar? Not gay, but an actual fairy (seriously, he did that!).

Puck? Not a dwarf, but a 7-foot tall guy possessed by a demon (what?).

Snowbird? Killed by her newborn demonic son.

Sasquatch? Had been killed during the Byrne run and returned on Snowbird's body, thus turning into a transexual Sasquatch.

The Guardian? Dead at the time, Mantlo retconned him into a manipulative bastard. Not even the dead could escape Mantlo's clutches!

I could go on, but it's WAY too painful. I loved the original team when I was a kid and the Mantlo Massacre was what made me have my very first big deception with comics (sadly not the last).

Pretty much the remainder of the original series run consisted on people trying to fix the damage Mantlo had done. It was done eventually, but then Marvel went on to make EVERY SINGLE Alpha Flight revival consisting on a bunch of new characters with a couple or so token original members. What the heck?

Getting back to John Byrne, he actually had an interesting formula for the series: Most issues dealt with the characters separately with the team only actually appearing together every six issues or so. It was (and is) different from other super-hero teams, which usually follow the standard approach of keeping the characters together all the time (seemingly with no life outside their heroic personas).

I don't know if it would work with the current "instant gratification" mentality, but it's better than getting another bunch of new characters and dropping in Sasquatch or Puck just to be able to call the team "Alpha Flight".

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

"Marinna has been established as being "out there" somewhere and is one of the most annoyingly unresolved mysteries of the Marvel U."

This mystery is dealt with in Dark Reign The List X-Men

"This mystery is dealt with in Dark Reign The List X-Men"

Whaaaa? Really? Wow, almost makes me care enough to buy that title....

Seriously, I'm annoyed that little bits of Alpha Flight classic keep getting thrown around the Marvel U. I was thrilled when Snowbird showed up in Incredible Hercules, but I was already buying that book anyway. I keep meaning to buy the "Weapon Omega" TPB if I can find it in a store. I would have bought "Dark X-Men," but the fact that Weapon Omega is no longer Guardian, but now "some guy in a Guardian-esque costume with a horeshoe on his chest" makes him uninteresting.

Please. Bring back the originals. I'd buy that. I bought that Wolverine: First Class issue just for that.

Would Alpha Flight work as an American team? I mean, if that's really the problem, why not just move them south?

I don't understand why Marvel doesn't just give Fred Van Lente an Alpha Flight book?

From what little I've seen of FVL on AF, he does a pretty good job writing them. Plus he's ALWAYS talking about how passionate he is about the team, come on Marvel, don't be such scrooges!

Here, you can have it for free:

There is no UN sanctioned, international superhuman peacekeeping force in the Marvel universe any longer. At one point, it was the Avengers, but that was in the Busiek days.

For reasons never quite explained, Canada (in the MU) has always been on the cutting edge of superhuman biotechnology.

So, with crazy ass Norman Osborn in charge of the American superhumans, the UN decides to go to Canada and commission a superhuman team from the Canadian government.

The series is a mixture of international operations balanced with an exploration as to why outwardly peaceful Canada has a long history of developing superhuman weapons.

adam, if your a flight fan it'll just piss you off.

But to the greater issue i've always liked the idea of a canadian team and the unique circumstances the can deal with... it's why the initiative should have worked at least on a small scale, if they were actually used in geographically and politically unique situations.

To be fair, as originally conceived, Alpha Flight did have a second unique aspect: they were a government sponsored team. That could have made them different. But they broke from that fairly early, and besides, the Avengers had already done the "wrestling with bureaucracy" angle with Henry Gyrich. Basically, Tom's right - although there are some good characters in the team, the group itself isn't a very strong concept for an ongoing series, unless for some reason there's a sudden demand for stories set in Canada.

Joe said: "Sure, they're 'just Avengers' if you just look at the cover and just looking for excuses to hate it just because it's Bendis."

Joe, I get the sense you may be the one who is over-simplifying, if not outright warping, what I was saying. How in the heck did a simple honest question directed (at least rhetorically) at something Tom Brevoort said involve either "hate" or "Bendis?"

Let's keep calm, here.

dave, i really like that concept and always felt that was something that would make sense considering there is a lot of international heroes that aren't being used.

heck you can put some alpha flight, maybe throw in captain Britain, maybe some soviet and china force members, have their meeting place somewhere like the justice league, where it is a force not sanctioned by a individual country but a world peace keeping force, that would treat hammer as if it was a terrorist organization.

i like it.

I'll also throw this out there for fun: my impression of Oeming's 2007 Omega Flight series is that he WANTED to make the team into the Canadian Avengers. The lineup as originally envisioned had the iconic equivalents of Cap (US Agent), Thor (Beta Ray Bill), Iron Man (Guardian), Hulk (Sasquatch), Wasp (Spider-Woman), and Talisman (Scarlet Witch) fighting Loki (Tanaraq and those Asgardian parasite things).

Clearly, something went horribly wrong with the book in the middle of the series, which was right around when Marvel shifted the book from an ongoing to a 5-issue limited. You can see it in issue 3, in which the story reeeeeallly stretched for absolutely no reason, and suddenly the story had to wrap up in a hurry with some plotlines left unresolved (like Shaman's ghost).

I don't know if OF would have been any good had it continued. I didn't exactly care for the lineup (3 Americans, one of whom killed the original team?), although Beta Ray Bill could have been promising since he's an alien and not bound to any nationality. However, the book *could have* been pushed as a take on the classic, big-threat, cosmic-dealing Avengers at a time when the "real" Avengers were reduced to a street-level team. Mighty Avengers is now filling that void, I guess, but Omega Flight appeared ready to do that 2 years ago.

@Dave:

Hmm, that is a really good point. GET ON IT, BREVOORT!

Dave + Varo -- bloody brilliant. Alpha Flight could totally function on an international scale yet just based out of Canada. Great excuse to pepper the book with a few stray international character from canceled series. I seem to recall the biotech angle revisted a few times in the first EXiles series.

Another freebie to throw in the mix.

In the 1960's, Canada had to deal with Vietnam War draft evaders from the U.S.-- given this history, wouldn't they be dealing with metahuman refugees from the Registration Act? Who would police all these registration evaders from the U.S.? Alpha Flight!

Unfortunately, it is difficult to come with the right concept. If it weren't so hard, Steve Seagle and Scott Lobdell and the Omega Flight creative team would have had smashing successes.

Maybe, the location is just part of what made Alpha Flight unique. Maybe the characters were another part of what made Alpha Flight unique. Maybe writing/drawing a story that showcases Alpha Flight's uniqueness as heroes (in this day and age) will be the "formula" to popularity.

Trying to find an "angle" or a "hook" (humor and super-conspiracies) is not a long-term solution to re-envisioning Alpha Flight. Only when the team and the comic are treated as equally viable as The Avengers and X-Men will Alpha Flight enjoy the success it deserves.

Being Canadian, I admit to no small bias on this point. I consider the backdrop and backstory of the team to be a strength, not a weakness. We also have no small amount of talent that could make a revived Alpha Flight series - not just a mini-series, but an ongoing title - work.

Robert J. Sawyer, for one example. You may have heard of him lately. Some of his stuff's been getting adapted to radio and TV drama in the last couple of years and it's going over well. It might be time for him to try his hand at writing comics.

Stuart and Kathryn Immonen? That could work, if they're interested in the idea. I'd certainly shell out for their work.

Would Paul Gross be interested in trying his hand at writing for comics? He's scripted everything else from stage plays to TV to motion pictures, his current gig on Eastwick notwithstanding. And like Sawyer, he's got "brand recognition" in a big way.

Ty Templeton?

Darwyn Cooke?

Let's see some other candidates for debate.

One more thing: I don't think we need American-style "fear your government" plotlines here either. We don't fear the institution of government in and of itself, but rather what individual politicians and bureaucrats can and will do to screw up the work of government. Guys like General Jeremy Clarke should be aberrations, not the rule, within our system(and the current real-world Prime MInister is another example of such aberrancy to these eyes of mine).