I know what you're thinking.  Alpha Flight?

Well, uh, yes.  I'm a little uncertain about it as well.  But Marvel say it's an X-book this time round, even though it wasn't on the first two occasions.  And undeniably, it was an X-Men spin-off - even though it was long-established as an unrelated comic years before the concept of an X-book even emerged.  So if Marvel say it's an X-book, it's an X-book.  To be honest, it's got a better claim than Sentinel.

Anyway, this is the first of five new ongoing titles being launched this month - the others being Captain America & The Falcon, Iron Fist, She-Hulk and Cable/Deadpool.  So that's four books which have each been cancelled twice before, plus a second monthly Captain America title.  On top of which, Marvel is once again just kind of dumping them on the market as an undifferentiated glop.  It's Tsunami 2, kids!  Place your bets now on when they get cancelled!  Will it be issue #10, or will they make it to the dizzy heights of issue #12?

Then again, most of the Tsunami X-books bucked the trend by surviving, which tends to suggest that the X-books still have the ability to draw at least a mid-size audience.  So Alpha Flight and Cable/Deadpool may yet stand a chance - though I have my doubts that Alpha Flight is really going to be embraced as a proper X-book by anyone.  To the extent that it even has a fanbase, it's a discrete one.

Scott Lobdell returns to Marvel to write the book, with art from Clayton Henry, who was the "regular" artist on Exiles for, ooh, not long enough to count.  In his editorial, Lobdell makes a rather awkward attempt to sell Alpha Flight as a good idea.  "There are just some comic book ideas," says Lobdell, "that are just so cool that every kid who has read a comic book ever in the history of the medium will - at one point or another- sit down with a pencil and paper and invent his or her own version of that concept!"  And one of those, he says, is "The Team Composed of Heroes from a Single Country."

Of course, we all know the tragic error of Lobdell's theory.  "They're all from Canada" is not a thrillingly cool idea, nor is it really a particularly interesting one.  In fact, unless you actually have something to say about Canada, or you really want to make use of the country as a background, it's not much of a gimmick at all.  And for the most part, the fact that Alpha Flight are Canadian has been more of a curiosity than anything else.  It's an accident of history, resulting from the fact that they were created to tie into Wolverine's origin.  No disrespect to Canada intended, but let's face it, Canada is not a drastically alien country.  It's basically a saner version of the USA, with added French people.

This is why, traditionally, nobody has played the "national hero" angle heavily with Alpha Flight.  John Byrne simply tried to make them work as characters (and later gave interviews admitting defeat, saying that they were simply too one-dimensional to carry their own series).  In the last series, Seagle played off their government-sponsored status and did paranoid mind-control stories.  None of this, really, had a great deal to do with Canada, any more than the West Coast Avengers were uniquely Californian.

And in reality, Lobdell doesn't go for the national identity angle either.  Instead, he goes for the comedy angle, with a tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating approach.  It's an approach that worked very well on Formerly Known as the Justice League, and there's certainly a market for it.  I'm not entirely convinced that it's what the Alpha Flight audience wants to see - if I was looking for an out-of-print team to take this approach, it would have been the Defenders - but hell, why not?

Unfortunately, for the most part, it's not all that funny.  There are a couple of decent jokes in there, to be sure, but at least as many that fall flat.  Sasquatch is, for some reason, putting together a new Alpha Flight team.  So he's going round trying to recruit Canadian heroes, and failing, for the entire issue.  Fair enough.  But it just doesn't work to have Sasquatch gives the "world that hates and fears you" speech, and be turned down.  That's the X-Men's line.  If Cyclops was trying to recruit mutants with that speech and failing, that would be mildly amusing.  When Sasquatch does it, the joke is completely out of place and doesn't work.

The new characters are a mixed bunch.  The 96-year-old recently emerged from a coma is actually a promising concept.  There are some possibilities in the new Major Mapleleaf, whose appalling costume and gimmick reflect the fact that he's not a superhero at all, but somebody who does presentations about the Mounties to schoolkids.  But the new Puck is just a generic sassy female, and Yukon Jack is a dreadful misfire - Lobdell is so busy sniggering to the reader about what an awful idea he is, that he inadvertantly convinces.

The art is patchy.  It's fairly attractive taken as individual panels, but there's a definite lack of flow in parts of the book.  Henry has a nasty habit of cutting repeatedly to reverse angles in the middle of a scene (check the pages with Sasquatch and Nemesis for a particularly good example).

It's not as bad a title as some of the reviews would have you believe, but it's certainly far from successful.  In theory there's nothing wrong with the approach Lobdell and Henry are trying here, but the book misses the mark noticeably.

Rating: C

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