Alpha Flight (idea)

Alpha Flight, Marvel Comics premier all-Canadian super-team, first appeared in Uncanny X-Men #120. Alpha Flight have gone on to star in 3 separate volumes of their own series, beginning with Alpha Flight Volume 1 #1 in August 1983. The series has recently been re-released with Alpha Flight Volume 3 #1.

The Marvel Universe is, for the most part, populated with American super heroes. Heroes like Captain America, the Hulk, Spider-man, Iron Man, the Avengers, the majority of the X-men, and the Fantastic Four are all citizens of the United States, who live their lives and smash evil within the borders of the Lower 48. This is fine and dandy, as the majority of North American comic book sales occur in the US. But, as comic book publishers quickly learned, millions of Canadian kids were waiting for some home grown talent to pop up in the pulps, yours truly included. This market was quickly filled by Alpha Flight.

Marvel's marketing department hit on a vein of nationalistic Canadian pride with the release of Alpha Flight. The team originated in a story written by John Byrne, an expatriate from Calgary, Alberta. Byrne introduced the team as a government super-team sent to recapture rogue experiment Weapon X, also known as the X-man Wolverine. Department H, the Canadian federal ministry responsible for protecting Canada against super-powered threats had a hand in the nightmarish experimentation that gave Wolverine his adamantium skeleton. Alpha Flight was sent to recapture Wolverine, told he had gone rogue and regressed to a feral state. Department H, like many monolithic state security agencies, was a mysterious and vaguely sinister place.

This first iteration of Alpha Flight was lead by James MacDonald Hudson, the man who actually found Wolverine wandering lost and half dead in the Rockies after his escape from the Weapon X program. Hudson and his wife Heather nursed the wild, feral Logan back to health. Hudson happened to be working at developing a super team for the government, as the Canadian public had grown tired of relying on foreign help every time a supervillain crossed the border. Donning a high tech suit developed for oil exploration by the shady AmCan Petroleum corporation, Hudson took up the mantle of Vindicator. As a major government funded initiative, Alpha Flight was lined up to be Canada's ultimate solution to the superpower arms race. An elaborate bureaucracy was developed, and a staged tier system of training teams was put in place. Gamma Flight accepted raw recruits from among Canada's native super powered population, either by choice or by force. Beta Flight contained members who were almost ready to see action as a team and Alpha Flight was the operational arm of Department H, and the pinnacle of the training system.

Alpha Flight succeeded in nabbing Wolverine after a battle with the X-men, but he later escaped. Alpha Flight would repeat this mission on several occasions, as the whims of Department H dictated.

The roster of Alpha Flight, like any other very large super team, has changed quite a bit throughout the years. The original team represents a core that has remained or reappeared though most team ups. They are:

Vindicator/Guardian: This gets tricky. James Hudson, the wearer of the trademark red and white maple leaf flight suit, has had a rough life. He has been killed and resurrected no less than 3 separate times. Hudson, originally an employee of Am-Can Petroleum, stole the blueprints for his experimental suit when he discovered his supervisor Jerry Jaxon had made plans to sell it to the American military as a weapon. Planned as an oil exploration tool, the suit allowed a user to fly, tunnel through solid bedrock, and fire explosive energy blasts, all while protected by a halo of plasma. On Alpha Flight's first mission, he called himself Weapon Alpha, but when leading the team on their next mission, he had changed his name to Vindicator. After Department H was closed due to budget cuts, and the group reformed independently, Hudson changed his name to Guardian. While fighting Omega Flight, a team of supervillains organized by a revenge seeking Jerry Jaxon, a fatal flaw in the flight suit "killed" Hudson in front of his team, and his wife Heather. Alpha Flight languished without a leader, so Heather took up the mantle of Vindicator and lead the team. James Hudson returned, under alien control, and lead the team. Hudson sacrificed himself to save the team when a deal with Galactus went sour. Heather again lead the team eventually changing her codename to Guardian. James Hudson returned once again, now under the control of the Master of the World. James was eventually freed from this control and the two adventurers switched names again, Heather sticking with Vindicator and Hudson taking Guardian. A synthoid clone of James Hudson would eventually be used by a more sinister Dept. H when the team was later reformed, but he would die while battling AIM forces. The clone thought himself to be the original James Hudson, as he had partial memories transferred to him via stolen technology taken from the High Evolutionary. He discovered the truth, and stepped down from the position, taking up the name Vindicator shortly before his death.

Sasquatch: Walter Langkowski joined Hudson's Alpha Flight initiative early on, seeking to use his scientific knowledge to help transform himself into a superhero in much the same way Bruce Banner was accidentally changed into the Incredible Hulk. Hudson agreed and set up Langkowski with a lab in the High Arctic. The experiment seemed successful, granting Walter the power to transform into a huge furry orange sasquatch with incredible strength at will. None of the negative effects that plagued Bruce banner seemed to exist with Walter. This was largely due to the fact that his new alter-ego was not a result of gamma-ray mutation, but from a bond he formed with an ancient Inuit spirit monster called Tanaraq. The Great Beasts eventually took over Walter's body, forcing his fellow teammate Snowbird to kill him. Eventually, Walter was resurrected and his bond to the beast was severed, allowing him to use his powers unfettered. He is the driving force behind the third reformation of the team.

Shaman: Michael Twoyoungmen was born into a Native Canadian tribe in the Rocky Mountains. Groomed from a young age to be a shaman for his tribe, Michael rebelled and turned his back on the traditional ways of his tribe, instead turning his attention to becoming an accomplished surgeon.

Michael went on to marry a woman called Kathryn, and the couple had a young girl, named Elizabeth. While Elizabeth was young, Kathryn was struck by a mysterious disease. Michael promised his daughter that he would save his wife. Despite his best efforts, Kathryn died, leaving Elizabeth feeling deeply betrayed. Elizabeth ran away, and Michael suffered a crisis of faith. He withdrew and lived a hermit's life in the wilderness.

Slowly, Michael took up the ways that he had turned his back on. He was then visited by the ghost of his dead grandfather, the tribes previous shaman, who taught him the secret mystic ways of the Native people. Most spectacular among his new skills was his ability to use a special medicine bag, from which he could pull anything he imagined. Using these new skills, Michael joined Alpha Flight to help protect Canada, and forward the cause of the mysterious Native gods he drew his power from. One of Michael's most important tasks was to midwife for the goddess Nelvanna, who gave birth to another champion of the North, Snowbird.

Snowbird: Known by most as RCMP Officer Anne McKenzie, Narya is a demi goddess, sent by the Native gods of the Arctic to protect the North from the threat of the Great Beasts. In ancient times, the gods had battled against these horrors and sacrificed their own existence in order to trap the Beasts outside of Earth's dimension. The barrier that held both the gods and the beasts was weakening, and in order to prevent it from ultimately collapsing, the gods crafted a plan. They would have a mortal champion born on Earth to help them ensure the barrier stood, against the plans of the Great Beasts.

Archaeologist Richard Easton, lured by the gods to the north, was brought through the barrier where he was mated with Nelvanna, Goddess of the Northern Lights. Nelvanna and Easton's child would be born of both gods and mortals, allowing her to exist on Earth and possessing extraordinary powers.

Nelvanna asked Shaman to help her through the difficult birth, as the child was being born into the mortal dimension, causing the goddess great pain. Shaman helped the procedure by casting a spell that bound the child to the North, giving it a physical form. Nelvanna charged Twoyoungmen with the care of the young demi goddess, whom she named Narya. The child aged quickly, and when Shaman joined Alpha Flight, Snowbird followed, using her arctic animal shape shifting, super strength and flight abilities to help the team. Alpha Flight would also go on to battle the Great Beasts as a team, aiding Narya in her role as guardian. In a strange twist of fate, Narya was killed, but her body used by Sasquatch's soul for a time before it was transformed into a copy of his original form. Narya has since returned in a new body.

Northstar: Jean-Paul Beaubier's young life started with tragedy. He and his sister Jeanne-Marie, who would go on to become fellow Alpha Flight team mate Aurora, where sent to orphanages when their parents were killed in a car accident in Quebec. Jean-Paul went on to be adopted, and lived a normal life until he hit his teenage years. As his mutant abilities of super-speed and flight began to manifest themselves, Jean-Paul became a troubled youth, arrogant and wrathful. He traveled for a time, joined a circus as an acrobat, and fell in with a group of radical Quebec Nationalists. When the group attempted a bus bombing, Beaubier foiled the attempt and renounced his connections to the group. He turned his attentions to professional skiing, quickly gaining champion status. It was at this point that James Hudson approached Jean-Paul to join his new superhero team, and introduced him to his long forgotten sister Jeanne-Marie. Jean-Paul took the codename Northstar and joined the group. He also discovered that his sister, deeply scarred by her experience in orphanages as a child, was a mutant like him. Together, the pair had amazing light-generation powers that neither could use on their own. Jean-Paul, felling guilty over his sister's poor mental state, vowed to protect her.

As with all mutants in the Marvel Universe, Northstar has had a terrible time trying to be accepted in the world. His arrogant and abrasive attitude saw him join and quit the team on many occasions, his relationship with Aurora is rocky at best, and Jean-Paul was the subject of a cruelly complex hoax by Loki, Asgardian god of Mischief, that had him convinced that he was an elf for several years.

In addition to his bizarre adventuring life, the character of Northstar has been a one-stop shop for Marvel to try to deal with hot social topics in it's Universe. During the course of a battle with a supervillain, Northstar discovered an abandoned baby in a dumpster. The child, taken in by Jean-Paul, was HIV-positive, and went on shortly afterwards to die of AIDS. This story, while emotional, was an attempt by Marvel to address AIDS within the context of their fictional world. It was also a test to see if they could pull off their next stunt: an amazingly blunt delivery of Northstar's coming out as the Marvel Universe's first openly gay superhero.

Troubled by the death of his daughter and the rampage of a villain driven mad by the AIDS death of his son, Northstar revealed his sexuality to the world, to act as a positive gay role model.

While this had little impact on the character in the context of the story, mass media reaction to Alpha Flight v1 #106 was immediate and heated. Marvel got boatloads of media attention, and the Comics Code Authority was called into question by more conservative media pundits. In the long run, it has become a non-issue.

Aurora: Jeanne-Marie Beaubier, long lost sister of Northstar, had a far less golden childhood than her brother. Jeanne-Marie ended up in a strict Victorian-style Catholic orphanage run by French-Canadian Nuns. A shy child, Jeanne-Marie was terribly abused, causing her to descend into mental illness. As a teen, Jeanne-Marie attempted suicide by jumping from a school roof. Saved by her mutant power of flight, she confessed what had happened to the Headmistress. After a severe beating administered by the nun for lying, Jeanne-Marie found that her psyche had split. Her Aurora personality remained hidden for many years after that. She stayed on at the school, hiding both her emerging mutant powers and her split personality.

After many years at the school, Jeanne-Marie finally rose to the position of teacher. During her celebrations, her Aurora personality took over, and she flew to Montreal to party. A mugger tried to take Aurora's purse but quickly found himself laid out. The fight was witnessed by a vacationing Wolverine, then part of the forming team. Aurora quickly agreed to a life of adventure with Alpha Flight. She was also reunited with Jean-Paul, which whom she shared amazingly similar powers. Aurora also possessed a variety of light-based powers with which she blinded and healed people around her.

During her time adventuring with Alpha Flight, Aurora has been perpetually plagued by her mental instability. Her Jeanne-Marie self often emerged, deeply upset at the rampaging and careless life Aurora enjoyed. Aurora also had a raging libido, and her lovers sometimes found themselves accosted by an upset Jeanne-Marie, a woman raised by nuns. Slowly, Aurora works to reunite her mind.

Puck: Eugene Milton Judd was born in early 1900's Canada, and he took up a wild life of adventuring and thievery, traveling around the world, stealing ancient treasures on commissions from wealthy collectors. After many years of carefree adventure, Judd was sent to steal the Black Blade of Baghdad, which, unbeknownst to him, was actually the mystic prison of a powerful sorcerer called Razer. Judd accidentally freed the trapped evil spirit, but sacrificed himself to make his body a new prison. Judd succeeded, but his body was shrunk down to dwarf size, made immortal, and racked by constant pain.

Judd turned his back on thievery, turning to espionage to make his way in the world. It was during this time that he first met Wolverine, then also in the spy business. He lived a rough life, plagued by pain and tortured by the demon spirit he held inside himself. Judd was ultimately discovered in jail, where his unique fighting abilities, acrobatic skills and unique body of knowledge caught the attention of James Hudson. Judd joined the team under the codename Puck.

During the adventures of Alpha Flight, the sorcerer Razer was eventually freed, robbing Judd of his abilities. His abilities were restored to him by fellow Alpha Flight member Sasquatch by using equipment captured from the Master of the World. Even when the demon was released, Judd remained at his new shorter stature. Puck also developed an extensive crush on Heather Hudson, but maintains a respectful relationship with her.

Marrina: Marrina Smallwood is not of this Earth. Thousands of years ago, The Plodex, a hostile alien race, sent independent colony ships out into the stars in order to conquer young worlds. The ship contained a sophisticated biological warfare system of imprintable Plodex eggs that would emulate the dominant species of a planet's biosphere, supplant it, and conquer the planet. Something went very wrong with this plan. The Plodex ship that was sent toward Earth crashed in the Arctic, and several eggs escaped into the freezing ocean. They remained undiscovered for hundreds of years until Thomas Smallwood, a Newfoundland fisherman, discovered one after being washed overboard during a storm. When Thomas's wife Gladys touched the egg, it imprinted on her DNA and Marrina emerged, clearly influenced by the sea. She grew to have incredible aquatic powers, and the Plodex's natural ability to blind opponents with a special gel secreted from her skin. The Smallwood's raised their small green skinned daughter until she joined Alpha Flight. She remained ignorant of her alien origins until she encountered another victim of the Plodex ship, the self-styled Master of the World.

Marrina fought against her predetermined fate as an alien killing machine, and against the whims of the Plodex as interpreted by The Master, until her final death at the hands of her husband, Namor the Submariner.

This core group of heroes formed the heart of Alpha Flight for most of the first volume of the book. Other heroes came and went during absences of major characters, usually due to deaths. Some major secondary characters include:

Box: Roger Bochs was a brilliant robotics engineers before he met with a crippling injury cost him both his legs, leaving him a paraplegic. Driven to regain his mobility, Bochs created a robotic suit that he used to adventure with Alpha Flight, which was dubbed Box, a blatant pun on his name. Roger, like most members of Alpha Flight, met with the loss of his powered suit on several occasions, a change that allowed him to bond with the robot, and the seeming restoration of his legs. Madison Jefferies, a mutant with the ability to transmute metal, also uses a version of the Box robot for a time.

Diamond Lil: Lillian Crawly, the nearly invulnerable Diamond Lil, first encountered Alpha Flight as a member of Omega Flight, a villainous group that battled the heroes. After their defeat, Lil had a change of heart and was recruited into the Alpha Flight trainee team Gamma Flight after her discovery by Department H agents. A mutant, Lil has superhuman strength and diamond like skin. During her tenure as a part of Alpha Flight, Lil was plagued not only by supervillains, but also by a medical scare, after finding a lump in her breast that needed a biopsy to determine if it was cancerous. A usually simple medical procedure, Lil's extremely resilient skin made the test almost impossible to conduct. Luckily, the test found no cancer and Lil continued to adventure with Alpha Flight.

Talisman: Elizabeth Twoyoungmen, the daughter of Alpha Flight member Shaman, abandoned her father after the traumatic death of her mother, a death she blamed her father for. Estranged for many years, Elizabeth was reunited with her father when the Great Beasts escaped from the mystic barrier Shaman was tasked to protect. When battling the sorceress beast Ranaq, Elizabeth demonstrated the ability to redirect the mystic blasts that struck her.

Soon after, the gods, through Snowbird, identify Elizabeth as the fulfillment of an ancient prophesy: She is "the one who binds all evil". Shaman offered her his medicine bag, from which Talisman pulled the source of her powers, a magic coronet. Placing it on her head, she is transformed into Talisman. Her powers increased to rival those of her father's, but she found that she couldn't remove her new jewelry. Still obsessed with blaming her mother's death on Shaman, Elizabeth continually battles and reconciles with her father. At one point, Shaman finds himself wielding Talisman's powers. Father and daughter continue on to eventually overcome their emotional scars.

Wild Child: Kyle Gibney, the mutant who would become know as Wild Child was abandoned by his parent when his feral behavior first emerged. Kyle turned to life on the streets, where his wild and violent behavior allowed him to survive. Soon, he found himself captured by the Secret Empire, a cult like group that quested for world domination. They experimented on his mutant physiology and engineered DNA enhancements that would make Wild Child a perfect mindless killing machine. Eventually escaping, he joined up with Omega Flight, a group of villains that was soundly defeated by Alpha Flight. Kyle reformed his ways and joined Alpha Flight under the codename Weapon Omega, hiding his true identity for a long period. When the secret of his past as a villain was exposed, the team forgave his past actions, and he changed his codename to Wildheart. Wild Child possessed animalistic heightened senses, extremely fast reflexes and amazing hand-to-hand fighting skills.

Windshear: Colin Ashworth Hume is a mutant who found he had the ability objects from "hard air". He first encountered the team when he was hired by Roxxon Oil to fight off an incursion by the Master world on Roxxon Property. Using a suit of flying armor much like Iron Man's to supplement his abilities, Hume battled alongside Alpha Flight, and was granted membership.

Purple Girl: Kara Kilgrave lived a normal life until her thirteenth birthday, at which point she turned purple from head to toe and found she had the mental ability to control those around her. Kara soon discovered that she was the illegitimate child of The Purple Man, a mind controlling supervillain that had had a fling with her mother years before. Troubled by her new powers, she turned to Alpha Flight to help her gain control. She eventually joined the team under the code name Persuasion. During the adventures of the team, Kara and her monstrous Gamma Flight teammate Goblyn became very close friends.

Nemesis: Nemesis, known only by her family name St. Ives, is for all intents and purposes undead. She fights with a long rapier-like sword called a Soul Blade, to which she is eternally linked. If Nemesis loses her sword for any length of time, she will eventually die. She also has the ability to teleport herself and those around her using a type of mystic portal. Her intentions are unclear, and she joined the team under strange circumstances, pursuing some hidden personal agenda.

Alpha Flight, as a secondary Marvel team book adventuring outside regular superhero haunts like New York City, lead a brutal existence. Deaths were common place, and extremely dysfunctional relationships between team members seemed the norm. Mental illness, disease, alien and mystical manipulation, shady government department controllers, twisted personal histories and some close family connections to many of their villains made for an unhappy team. Most of Alpha Flight's opposition came from previous friends or those that had some hand in their creation as heroes. The major villains battled by Alpha Flight as listed here:

Omega Flight: The original Omega Flight was created by Jerome Jaxon, the man that James Hudson stole the original Guardian suit from to keep it from falling into military hands. A second formalized group also served the Master of the World as henchmen. Designed as a supervillain group, the roster of Omega Flight changed quite often, even holding eventually Alpha Flight members Diamond Lil and Wild Child for a time. Usually used as muscle for a master villain, Omega Flight regularly overcame the heroes, except one embarrassing outing when they were trounced by Gamma Flight trainees.

The Master of the World: Perhaps the key Alpha Flight nemesis, the self-styled Master of the World returned time and time again to plague the team. Sharing a common origin with Alpha Flight member Marrina, the Master was a victim of the Plodex ship that crashed in the Arctic. thousands of years ago. Originally a nomad called Eshu who was turned out into the tundra by his tribe, The Master stumbled upon the wreckage of the Plodex ship. Having lost the imprintable eggs it needed to fulfill its intended purpose, the ship captured, vivisected and stored Eshu's living brain to determine if he would be the "dominant lifeform" on the planet. Eshu survived the process, and turned mentally turned against the ship, eventually dominating it over hundreds of years. Using Plodex technology, he recreated his body and took up the ship's mission: World Domination. Many of the Master's plots where aimed at retrieving Marrina to use her to complete the Plodex's mission, eventually leading to her death. More recently, the Master fought against Kang the Conqueror's massive attack on the world, claiming it as his prize. He was seemingly killed when the Avenger Warbird gutted him will a shard of metal, but he has been "dead" before.

The Great Beasts: The demons of ancient Native beliefs, the Great Beasts were trapped behind a mystic barrier that barred them from acting on the world, until it recently began to decay. Alpha Flight battled the plans of the Great Beasts on many occasions, as their members Sasquatch, Snowbird and Shaman where all directly linked to these ancient monsters. Alpha Flight's second mission as a team was to defeat an avatar of the Great Beast Tundra who had risen in the Arctic.

Sadly for Canadian fans, Marvel canceled the first volume of Alpha Flight with issue 130 in March, 1994. Many attribute this to the flagging sales from title saturation due to Marvel's impending bankruptcy, and gradually poorer production values toward the end of the series. However, this was not the end of Alpha Flight as a series, as Volume 2 was released in 1997. This second series only lasted for 20 issues, and introduced a new take on the team.

Department H, which existed on and off during Alpha Flight's original series, was restarted for a fourth time by the Canadian Federal Government. After the villain Onslaught seemingly killed the majority of the big name American superheroes during his death in New York (as a part of Marvel's Heroes Reborn marketing), the government decided to address Canada's superhero gap, by any and all means necessary.

Lead by General Jeremy Clarke, the man responsible for disbanding the original Alpha Flight, the new Department H became a sinister entity, brainwashing former members of Alpha Flight Puck and Heather Hudson, experimenting upon test subjects without their consent, and forcibly conscripting orphans into the superpowers program. The department was given carte blanche, and they used it to give free reign to a series of scientists, each of whom followed their own agendas.

The new team consisted of:

Guardian: Seemingly resurrected again, this version of James Hudson was half of the age of the man who last wore the Guardian suit. During the initial days of Dept. H, DNA samples were collected from James Hudson, and these were used to clone a new synthetic copy to lead the team. This version of Guardian lacked many key memories that the original had, like knowledge of his marriage to teammate Heather Hudson, and eventually discovered the truth. He died in confrontation with AIM forces.

Vindicator: Captured by the Epsilon Flight shock troops of the new department, Heather Hudson was brainwashed into joining the new team. She was issued a new suit that tapped into geothermal energy, allowing her to control lava and plasma blasts. Heather slowly pieced together the mysterious circumstances surrounding her conscription and the bizarre return of her dead husband, and eventually lead the team to rebel against the sinister department.

Puck: Captured and brainwashed in a similar manner to Vindicator, Puck was the one who eventually unraveled the mystery surrounding the new team. A previous employee of the orphanage where new members Flex, Radius and Murmer where kidnapped from, Eugene was tipped off by a mysterious informant about the manner in which the new heroes where added to the team. Like Vindicator, Puck would piece together little bits of the puzzle, only to be blanked out again. Epsilon Blacks, the elite troopers employed by Department H, accosted Puck when he learned the truth about the Orloo, Ontario "Hull House" Orphanage. He eventually overcame the control while searching for the truth behind the apparent death of his fellow teammate Sasquatch.

Sasquatch: When trying to capture and brainwash former Alpha Flight member Sasquatch, the new Department H made a mistake. The creature that they returned with was an actual wild sasquatch, with no connections to the hero Walter Langkowski. The huge aggressive animal can only be controlled by the powers of Murmer, one of the conscripted orphans. Puck and Vindicator are mystified by the failure of their old friend to break free of his feral state, not knowing that it was not the same creature they had known. During a mission, the beast dies, and a horrified Puck escapes Department H to discover the truth about the animal's origins, and the brainwashing employed by the department.

Flex, Radius, and Murmer: Jared Corbo, code named Radius, his brother Adrian Corbo, code named Flex, and Arlette Truffaut, code named Murmer, where all orphans living at "Hull House", an orphanage in Orloo, Ontario. Department H used the orphanage as a collection point for children identified as having superpowers, and using similar brainwashing techniques as they employed on the original Alpha Flight members, pressed the mutant youths into service. Radius and Flex were discovered to be the children of Unus the Untouchable, a supervillain that died at the hands of the X-men. Radius shared his father's personal force field ability, while his brother Flex could transform parts of his body into steel blades. Murmer used pheromones to control those she touched, in a manner very similar to those of previous Alpha Flight member Persuasion.

Manbot: A robot that looks vaguely like their former teammate Box accompanies the new team on missions for two purposes: to assist in battles, and to monitor the mental controls established by Department H. Manbot is a mindless machine, and Department H's mole within the new team. It continually sends back data to it's handlers, allowing them a measure of control. Manbot would eventually break free from this role and join the team in rebelling against these controls.

When Puck finally unravels the mystery behind the brainwashing used by the Department, the team rebelled. Hidden in the Microverse by a sympathetic scientist, the team regrouped and returned to clean up the corrupt department. General Clarke sacrificed himself to stop a dangerous meltdown at Alpha Flight Headquarters, and the regime he supported came crumbling down. The teams final adventure saw many of the original members return to fight along side them as they battled with the most hideous result of the unchecked experimentation by Department H: The new Weapon X. A biological super-colony of mutated bacteria trapped within a containment suit were slowly killing the man used to control them. In the final issue of volume 2, the new and old Alpha Flights defeated this deadly foe. And again, Marvel canceled the book.

Recently, Volume 3 of the Alpha Flight series has been released. In this newest iteration, Sasquatch Walter Langkowski recruits a new team from across the country to help him rescue former Alpha Flight members from a mysterious prison.

The new team currently consists of:

Sasquatch: Walter Langkowski returns to lead a team of replacement heroes to help save his old teammates.
Major Mapleleaf: Louis Sadler, an invulnerable, gravity defying strongman joins up with the team to help rescue his childhood heroes. Sadler is a bit of a Dudley Do-right type, with over the top courtesy and general doe-eyed innocence.
Yukon Jack: A warrior from a lost civilization deep in the Canadian Interior, Yukon Jack is sent out by the elders of his tribe to gain some worldly experience.
Puck: Shuzha Yu, the original Puck's daughter, shares most of her father's athletic ability and fighting prowess.
Centennial: Rutherford Princeton, an aging black man, is super strong and has the ability to fly, but he is relatively uninterested in crime fighting. He resigns himself to help, but his costume consists of a collared shirt, cardigan sweater and slacks.
Nemesis: From the original team, the zombie is blackmailed by Langkowski into joining the team by way of a control device implanted in her neck. She vows to kill all the members of the team when she gets the chance.

Will this new team go on to protect Canada from super powered threats? Only time will tell.