ALF #28: "Cross-Over"

("I had hoped for a more inspiring epitaph.")

Comments

At last, the final John Byrne-penned issue of Alpha Flight.  I feel like I should do something different to mark the event, like last time, but really I can't do much more than wave small flags slowly and with great exhaustion. No winners, only survivors.

Perhaps part of this is the low-key conclusion to Byrne's run here.  I don't mean "low-key" in the sense of being slow and contemplative, I mean it in the sense that it's almost impossible to tell the book is about to change writers at all. Absent Byrne's goodbye note at the end of the issue, I'm quite sure I'd never have suspected this was his final story.  Not that this was uncommon for the times.  We spend so much time these days discussing whether or not a writer has had time to tell their story and develop their themes before the inevitable reshuffle/relaunch/cancellation that it's interesting to look back at an era where that was pretty much unheard of in superhero comics.  Byrne had a few long-running concerns he would return to from time to time, but basically there's never been a point in this run where he'd need more than an issue or two to step off and hand over.

The only real hint that Byrne might have found himself with too little time to do what he wanted is the rather perfunctory way the Omega Flight storyline finishes off here. They're fleeing from the mall before it can be eaten by Shaman's medicine bag, but run into Madison Jeffries, who builds an impromptu Transformer to beat up various Omega Flight members - and kill one of Flashback's future selves, which forces the villain to confront the fact he's now certain to die at some random point in the future like every other person ever - and then literally turn Courtney inside-out.  This all happens very quickly and early in the issue, and feels too random even to really work as deus ex machina (perhaps ironically given Jeffries's skill set). But as Marge Simpson once said, it's an ending, let's leave it at that.

(There's also a weird moment here where Madison tells Diamond Lil that he's convinced she and Wildchild at the very least have been under some kind of mental suggestion/control by Courtney, as murderous vendettas really aren't their style. Which, OK, I always think this kind of reveal is pretty weak - just a way of excusing bad characterisation or plotting - but since Byrne invented these characters and we never saw them in action pre-Omega Flight, there's no real foul here.  What's strange here though is that Jeffries immediately follows this revelation by leaving the two of them to be arrested, announcing he'll see his ex when she gets out in six years or so. So she might actually be innocent but he's not going to bother checking?  Not cool. And I say that with more than one ex-girlfriend I wouldn't shed any tears over hearing they'd been sent to the chokie.)

Of course, a writer's final issue on a book can be remarkable for reasons other than a grand finale or a thematic wrap-up. One option would just to be make sure you go out bringing your A-game.  In truth, there isn't really that much evidence of that here, but I'll certainly grant that this is one of Byrne's stronger efforts.  The rescue of Talisman after Shaman failed to save her personally (despite promising he could) finally provokes Elizabeth to take her father to task for how much of a "Daddy knows best" douchebag he's been ever since she showed up back in his life.  For all that it's taken far too long to get to, it's really nice to see Talisman point out just how huge a dick move it was on her father's part to let her put on her tiara without bothering to explain it could never be removed. It's perhaps a little less justifiable to be so angry over Shaman's broken promise to save her from the bag, given a) if she hadn't gone in three of their friends would have died, b) it's not his fault she wouldn't risk her life for those people without a guarantee of her safety, and c) complaining that Shaman acted badly after she leapt into the void is implicitly arguing that he should have let Snowbird be murdered rather than try to save them both. All of that just means that Shaman isn't clearly 100% in the wrong, though. That's not the same thing as Elizabeth not having the right to feel the way she does, despite Heather's doubtless well-intentioned attempt to come to Shaman's defence.

Calling out Shaman on his patriarchal attitude is probably one of the best character moments Byrne has generated so far in terms of gender politics, and it's particularly appreciated considering how down we've been on him on the topic since the very first issue. This is strengthened by Heather getting angry in the closing pages when she learns Bochs and Langkowski have been searching for a new biological body for the latter to steal and wear as a meat suit, and that none of the people who knew of the plan thought it was worth sharing with her, despite her role as leader. Which goddamn, that's a good point.  I admit I've never actually had anything approaching an employee, but you'd better believe that if I did have, I'd want them to check with me over whether the company's dress code included stolen biped bodies.  It's taken forever for Byrne to deliver on having a woman as leader in the book, but he at least manages something here, just before he bows out.

So it's a top quartile Byrne book, insofar as its slightly sexually progressive (letting your ex get arrested for a crime you're not sure she's guilty of aside) rather than noticeably retrograde, and because there's no ball dropping either in plot or characterisation (and Byrne's latest Transformers rip-off looks actually quite cool and sinister). There was no cringe-inducing commentary on mental health issues. His run doesn't finish off focussing on a completely different team to the one he's ostensibly writing about. Faint praise this all might be - especially for a man with so oddly strong a legacy - but praise it remains.  I am not sorry I had to pay for this book.

Indeed, the only real problem I have with the issue is that Byrne's own cover gives away the page 22 cliff-hanger, as the "almost mindless" creature Bochs has hooked proves to be the Hulk, banished to another dimension by Dr Strange (I think). Thanks to the cover, the cliff-hanger is not only spoiled, but awkward questions are immediately generated regarding how anyone could watch the Hulk and conclude he was almost mindless. I realise this is a bum note generated simply through the need to justify Sasquatch's plan to steal himself a new body, but the end result still comes off as contemptuous of anyone not capable of declining verbs; if anyone out in the real world tried to suggest someone at the Hulk's level of intellectual development should be essentially considered as a courtesy car for anyone rich enough to pay scientists for a mind-swap they'd be pelted with monkey wrenches, and deservedly so.

A minor and qualified success, then, and a damn sight better than Byrne's batting average on the title. Maybe the most damning thing about all this is the thought that this is his A-game after all. But someone else will have to have the final word on that.  I've finished with Byrne until at least the '90s, and at the end of this run I'm not sure I even find him interesting enough to beat up anymore. It's not the last word he'll want, nor one that reflects his unquestionable influence on the world of Marvel comics, but I'm afraid it's the best I can do. "Sometimes, he wasn't insufferable."

Let's move on.

Clues

This story takes place over the course of a few hours.

Date

Sunday 24^th June 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+115.

Contemporary Events

Nothing at all. 24/06/1984 continues to be the date interest forgot.

Standout Line

"What happens to me, an' Child, an' Flashie?"
"Looks like Flashback's gonna be busy goin' crackers f'r a bit, Lil."

ALF #27: "Betrayal"

(The excluded middle.)

Contents

This month's Alpha Flight is all about the dangers of looking before you leap. 

So last time around one half of the team found themselves captured by a reformed Omega Flight (minus Smart Alec, who went mad/catatonic last time the teams tussled) led by the resurrected Guardian, who was revealed in fact to be the robot who essentially got the real Guardian killed in the first place.

First order of business for our cybernetic villain is to get his metallic protruberances on the other half of the team.  Before that, though, we need to drop in on what that half is up to. Shaman is busy bandaging up Aurora (Shaman is a doctor: THIS IS IMPORTANT!) after her unfortunate encounter with the bargain-basement Protectobots last issue. Bochs, meanwhile, has been busy finding an alternative body for Sasquatch to take possession of, so that Bochs can have his robotic suit back and gambol once more through marigold fields, crushing each one beneath his giant steel feet as God intended. And it seems like he's hit paydirt; having put together an interdimensional scanner with Shaman's help (Shaman has knowledge of weird alternate dimensions: THIS IS IMPORTANT!) that's picked up a humanoid form built like "a brick shipyard" with almost no recognisable brain-functions. Looks like Walter's house-hunting is finally almost at an end!

I'm pretty uncomfortable about this.  "Virtually no brain-wave pattern that we can detect" sounds like a loophole you could drag Sasquatch's chrome-plated arse through after a three month diet of robo-burgers and oilshakes. This thing is from an alternate dimension and all you've collected is a silhouette.  You can't even photograph it but we're supposed to believe you've performed a serious survey into it's mental capabilities (which obviously might be difficult to measure given its utterly alien origin).  You think anything with opposable thumbs won't come with at least a little nous? Are we saying we'd be happy with Sasquatch pouring his mind into, say, a gorilla?  Because it'd be quicker than Bochs building another suit? This all sounds incredibly sketchy from a moral perspective. It also sounds like an obvious recipe for disaster; I'd put the chances of this extradimensional bruiser not totalling the lab within fifteen picoseconds of being beamed into Canada at about 0.000054%. And I should know.

Just think a bit before inviting this thing round for tea and body-theft.  That's all I'm saying.

Further discussion on the matter is curtailed when Shaman is hit with waves of agony. The robot once known as Delphine Courtney is torturing Talisman, which acts as an automatic SOS beacon with added unpleasantness. Shaman doesn't get anything so useful as a sit-rep from the experience, but it's clear his daughter is in real trouble, so along with Aurora and Sasquatch, he rustles up some teleports, and the team head for battle.

But it's not just Shaman who's picking up bad vibrations. Snowbird has received the message too, and despite her self-imposed exile into the land of infinite sexytimes, she's willing to reveal that she's still on Earth to her former teammates if it means she can save Talisman.  Which is of course terribly noble of her. But remember how I mentioned looking before you leap? We'll be coming back to that.

Shaman, Aurora and Sasquatch arrive to find Ms Naughtybot back in disguise as Guardian. Since they don't know the truth yet, they buy entirely the story "Guardian" sells them that Omega Flight has been dispatched.  The trap is set, but Shaman accidentally short-circuits the plan when he mentions that, lacking for better ideas, he shrank Smart Alec and stuffed him in his medical bag after the villain lost his mind, and has been carrying him around in said receptacle ever since. Even the erstwhile Delphine Courtney - a goddamn robot, need I remind you - has sufficient juice in her empathy circuits to note that this is horrendous. Sure, SA was a villain.  But right now he needs medical care, something which Shaman (HE'S A DOCTOR! THIS IS IMPORTANT) should be entirely aware of.  The fact that his condition was brought about by magic is neither here nor there; what matters is that the actual results of that condition mean he needs to be put in a bed somewhere whilst cared for and observed. Sticking hin in a magic bag because that way he's out of sight is entirely obscene.  Though it's also entirely in keeping with Shaman's character.  Generally speaking it's entirely right and proper to blame a writer for the terrible opinions of their characters if there's no indication anywhere that those opinions should be challenged.  On this occasion, Byrne has us covered.

Which brings us to the centrepiece of the issue. Upon learning of Smart Alec's fate, "Guardian" steals Shaman's medicine bag in the hopes of rescuing his erstwhile co-conspirator. Finding itself unable to find itself a miniaturised colleague, the robot turns his prize inside-out, and everything goes to hell.

Apparently, the simple act of inverting Shaman's medicine bag generates the Void, a sucking vortex of power that looks like a cross between a rainbow spider-web and an exploding Phalanx, and which would be perfectly happy to swallow the entire world.  This, quite frankly, seems like a terrible property for a man-purse to have.  Who amongst us hasn't turned a wee bag inside out whilst trying to find a biro? I can't see a comatose miniaturised genius being any easier to find.  You grab something you think is what you want but which is actually the hem of the bag and POOF! World over.

Anyway, once everything goes a bit Bing Kong Tong, the Guardian robot and its mates beat a hasty retreat.  Unhappily, Shaman can't do the same, both because he bears responsibility for the expanding multi-coloured deathweb, and because Heather, Northstar, Puck, Aurora and Sasquatch have already been swallowed up. The problem now is two-fold: no-one can dive in and rescue them without someone on the outside to act as an achor, and no-one can go in their in the first place without risking insanity and worse.  No-one, that is, save Talisman. Which is its own problem, as Elizabeth is understandably reluctant to dive into a roiling, insanity-inducing realm to try to drag out four grown humans and a robotic shell.

And so Shaman makes his second mistake.  It's a mistake that fits in perfectly with both the theme of the issue and with Michael Twoyoungmen's past, but that doesn't make it any easier to watch.  Thirteen years ago Dr Twoyoungmen promised his five-year-old daughter that his medical chops were up to the task of saving her mother. It's a completely natural thing to say - a natural mistake to make - and I was never really sympathetic to Elizabeth's decision to blame her father for the accidental lie his mother's death made of his insistences. This time, though, Shaman isn't promising to defeat an as-yet unidentified medical condition. He's promising to care enough about his daughter to pull her out of a mess he's asked her to enter, so that she won't go mad and die.  Failing to keep that promise would be utterly unforgiveable.

So Talisman jumps in.

It takes her little time to find the adrift Alpha Flight and nudge them in Shaman's direction. It seems everything will go to plan... and then disaster strikes. Remember my warning about looking before you leap? Turns out Snowbird didn't get the memo, and she was jumped by "Guardian" the moment she arrived.  Shaman now has a choice to make: help Snowbird, or save Talisman.

In thematic terms, this makes perfect sense: Shaman is absolutely primed to view everyone's lives as his to save, and once again that arrogance is in danger of damaging his family (and rather more directly this time), primarily because he's sure he understands the Void well enough to know in advance when the point of no return will arrive (HE'S A DIMENSION-HOPPING DOCTOR! HOW IMPORTANT!). Alas, in terms of actual plot logic, this is total crap. "Guardian" has captured Snowbird, but he hasn't actually threatend to kill her. Talisman is right at the edge of the Void, and will take but a second or two to free. This is made rather clear in fact when Shaman reaches into the Void, pulling out instead of his daughter the material he needs to distract Snowbird's captor.

In short, Shaman chooses a teammate who wasn't certain to be doomed within the next few seconds over his daughter who absolutely was.  This might be superficially of use in forcing Shaman to relive the horrors of his past, but it's only possible because a female character is being thoughtlessly fridged to do it. That's not the sort of dramatic beat we should be celebrating.

But then this isn't the end. There's a crossover coming to sort everything out, which won't resolve the problems of this issue, but will at least draw a line under them.  It's time, in other words, to dive back into the shallow, brackish waters of Secret Wars II.

Not just yet, though. It's high time we returned to our only current female author, and her voyage into meta-commentary.

Let's get our Longshot on.

Clues

This story takes place over the course of a few minutes.

It's mentioned here that Box and Sasquatch-as-was have been working for a little while on the "get Walt a body" project Bochs dreamed up in issue 25. We've got the Gantt chart as having taken up a month so far, which seems reasonable.

Date

Sunday 24^th June 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+115.

Contemporary Events

I think the fact that last time around I listed the birth of Khloe Kardashian as being the most newsworthy thing to happen on 24.6.84 indicates there's really nothing for me to go with here.

Standout Line

"Just to recap for you..."

Christ Jesus, Byrne, would you put some fucking effort in? There must be thousands of approaches to exposition/recapping less clunky than this. The fact this dialogue is the start of Bochs explaining to Aurora the state of play regarding her own goddamn boyfriend just makes it all the worse.

ALF #26: "If At First You Don't Succeed..."

(Irreconcilable differences.)

Comments

Last issue was Guardian's tearful reunion with those who thought him dead. This time around he's thrown himself back into the action, leading the whole team (minus Heather and Northstar) into combat once again. There's no time for convalescence when villainous blue/gold robots are on the loose. They can fly! They can shoot constricting electro-ropes! They can even pull this shit:

which makes me somewhat nostalgic for my childhood.

I only had the arms, though, because my  parents hated me.

Despite this last-minute bid for gold, these two-colour robots remain distinctly unimpressive, but as with Caliber last issue, there's no doubt that this is the point. Whatever else I think of Byrne, I'll say this for him: surrounded by titles which insist on passing off even the most ridiculous ideas as terrifying threats to our heroes, Byrne does pretty well slapping together obvious losers for Alpha Flight to slap around in between the emotional beats. Having Guardian take down two robotic suits/full on robots in as many issues is also a nice moment of foreshadowing for the episode's twist end, so points awarded there.

Speaking of emotional beats, though, the five robots might be dispatched with contemptuous ease, but Guardian's gung-ho approach ends up with Aurora badly hurt and in need of medical attention. To the observer it might seem he is rather too unconcerned about his team-mate, but there's little time to discuss the matter; Heather has just called in for back-up.  Shaman takes Aurora and a very worried Box somewhere they can patch the former up, and Guardian takes Talisman and Puck to back up his wife.

The new battleground proves to be the cavernous interiors of Edmonton Mall (cue Robin Sparkles flashbacks), and the new enemy rather an old one: Omega Flight. Or some of them, at least, Diamond Lil, Flashback, and Wildchild. In theory, our heroes outnumber their foes - Flashback's constant self-multiplication notwithstanding - but somehow Puck, Talisman and Northstar are all quickly defeated by a mysterious assailant working alongside Omega Flight. And each time they strike, they reveal more of their costume. Knowing how this ends, it's hard to tell how many views are needed to figure out it's Guardian, but I don't see how it can be more than two. But I do like the fact that it becomes more obvious visually as it becomes more obvious logically; it's a nice touch.

But what is now clear to everyone else is not yet so to poor old Heather, who has to follow up the indignity of being abandoned in the mall by Northstar with having her newly-returned husband reveal himself to be a robot in a skin suit.  And not just any robot; the same robot who was posing as Delphine Courtney during the last tussle with Omega Flight which got Mac killed in the first place.

The problem with all this is how stupid it makes Heather look. Alright, "Mac" kind of covered himself with the line about being partially robotic following his rebuilding by the space jellyfish, but even so, if you can't tell the difference between a robot with "syntho-skin" covering and your own husband when he kisses you, you have to wonder whether you're qualified to be allowed out of the house unescorted.  I mean, dear God, Chekov was able to suss those early Terminators out in Salvation, and he was like seven years old at the time.

Leave that aside, though, and I rather like this twist.  I mentioned last issue that knowing this was coming renders ALF #25 somewhat lightweight, but I think the reverse holds; without knowing what's coming I think ALF #25 makes what happens here all the more surprising.  By offering an immediate solution to the question of why James Hudson lives - one that I suppose we could even call "plausible" by the standards of superhero resurrections - the story plays into the standard model only to sweep it away an issue later.

Of course, all of that relies on you not having paid any damn attention to the cover art, which Byrne drew himself. Still, maybe it only looks like its giving the game away because I already know which game is being played.

Anyways, definitely an issue in the very top tier of a generally disappointing/aggravating title.

Clues

This story takes place over the course of a single day.

It's hard to tell how long has passed between this issue and the last one.  You'd think it couldn't be too long, what with Heather not yet having figured out her husband is now a cut-price terminator.  That said, though, maybe not-Mac has been keeping himself away from her as he set up those training sessions with the Canadian military. Plus, as mentioned, if she can't recognise a robot in rubber skin when it was Frenching her, the woman is clearly useless.

So let's stick this a month after last issue, as we continue trying to make up the time necessary for this title to intersect with "Secret Wars II".

Date

Sunday 24^th June 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+115.

Contemporary Events

Khloe Kardashian is born into a world desperate for the kind of leadership only she can provide.

Standout Line

"You look like reasonable robots."

Puck refuses to consider the fact that flattery is illogical.

ALF #25: "...And Graves Give Up Their Dead../Up From Lazarus' Box"

(Return of the Mac)

Comments

...And Graves Give Up Their Dead..

We open this issue on an impromptu "hearing", as Alpha Flight digests the fact that Northstar used to run with terrorists seeking to gain independence for Quebec by exploding strategic mailboxes.

Northstar, of course, is typically arsey about the whole affair, refusing to recognise the right of anyone in Alpha to judge him.  Which in some sense might actually be fair enough. Heather is keen to stress that they are simply mulling over as a group what to do with this information, but since 'Star doesn't actually want to be in Alpha Flight (which makes it hard to understand what he's doing here, actually), they're really deciding whether to turn him in to the authorities or not.  They should just be up front about that. Does having once fought for independence through the use of violence against inanimate objects mean you should be dobbed in years later?  And does that calculus change if you also happen to be an unbearable dick at all times?

Underneath this is lies an interesting question, actually, though one which I must be cautious about. I freely admit I have only the very most basic understanding of the Quebec Sovereignty Movement, and the FLQ - who, simplistically seeking, were a coalition of hard-line nationalists and proponents of one of the heavier brands of socialism - so I don't want to accidentally offend through ignorance.

That said, whether or not I think Jean-Paul should be clapped in irons for his past choices is entirely beside the point - I quite obviously don't get a say in how Quebec should manage its affairs, and whether the Quebecois or Canadian governments generated conditions problematic enough to justify blowing things up.  The question is whether fellow Canadians get to judge him.

Which leads me on to a topic that's been buzzing around my head for a few months now, ever since first Jack Graham and then Phil Sandifer came out in favour of the idea that the oppressor - even the unwitting oppressor - hasn't any right to engage on the subject of what the oppressed can and cannot do in their fight against them. In most respects, this is a hard idea to argue against - well, it is as a straight white western middle-class man - but there are two major issues here.   The first is the issue of intersection; I'm uncomfortable with the idea of white men proposing a system of thought that essentially says white women and black men, say, have no right to mention the effect their respective battles might have upon each other.  The second, which is the one relevant to this issue of ALF, is this: who gets to define what constitutes oppressed in any case?

Because it quite simply cannot be the decision by someone to announce themselves oppressed.  If that were the case, we'd have to include vast swathes of the US Republican Party and Nigel Farage.  Despite being one of those elite liberals sitting in my ivory tower with no idea about the real world, I have absolutely no problem expressing exactly how much those guys can go fuck themselves.  My purpose here is obviously not to equate right wing shouty white guys with the genuinely oppressed.  It's just to point out the limits of a maximalist approach to people on either side of a dividing line  without any ability to determine whether that line should be drawn. Put another way, why should a white guy's decision as to who is legitimately oppressed carry any more weight than their suggestions as to how the oppressed should behave.

None of this, I feel confident in predicting, would have come up at the trial of Northstar.  As Graham has pointed out, the entire basis of the X-books would seem to be straight white guys writing stories about how the oppressed shouldn't get too far out of line.  Any dissection that Byrne got around to on the subject would almost certainly be enraging beyond words.

Still, it would have been an interesting form of enraging.  Sadly, we'll never get to find out, because proceedings are interrupted when Talisman discovers Caliber has broken out of jail - and is busy trading blows with James Hudson...

Up From Lazarus' Box

So Guardian is back.  Walter Langkowski makes a quip about this being the sort of thing that only happens in comic books, but looking back over the X-books in particular it's interesting how free they are of hero recycling. Once you filter out the kind of immediate resurrection Claremont specialises in (see Grey, Jean or New Mutants, all of the), there's really only Xavier in the '60s to point toward.

So give Byrne credit, he does a fairly good job of lampooning the practice before it even solidified into a cliche. Well, I think he's lampooning it. It can be hard to tell with Byrne which of the excesses are ironic and which are meant to be taken literally. I mean, I assume the idea that Hudson escaped death by using the explosion that apparently killed him as a gate into the space-time continuum allowing him to escape to C 8000 BC Ganymede and befriend the floating jellyfish/Cthulhu beings that live there so they could rebuild him as a cyborg and put him in suspended animation until he could hop into the rocket home - *deep breath* - is supposed to be obviously over the top. Certainly the fact that the story proves to be utter bollocks in a few issues suggests that.

Even so, though, the idea of intelligent jellied invertebrates carrying on in the orbit of Jupiter actually sounds a good deal more interesting than Heather's tearful admission that her life does not exist beyond her husband. Which is the main problem here, actually.  Before the reveal about what's really going on with Mac, his story seems more interesting than the one Byrne is focused on.  After it, you've just got six pages of lies and another round of Caliber getting beaten up.

Still, for all that I've already lamented the fact that another car-crash issue of Alpha Flight would give me something to talk at length about, I suppose any issue that's no more than mildly uninteresting should count as a win at this point.


Clues

This story takes place over a single day. There's no indication of how soon it takes place after Alpha's return from the alternate dimension where Snowbird finally achieved her goal.  From Walter's dialogue about the difficulty in adjusting to a metal body, it can't be all that long - there's also the matter of how long Aurora was willing to sit on her info about her brother, but then she's already been doing that for a little while, so who knows. 

Given how far behind this series is to its cousins, I want to move things forwards quickly; I think a fortnight from the destruction of Walter's body isn't utterly unreasonable, so that's what I'll go for.

Date

Thursday 24^th May 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+84.

Contemporary Events

It's a busy day for a certain subset of geek interests, as Sarah Hagan is born (she will go on to play potential Slayer Amanda in the final season of Buffy) and Vince McMahon, Sr., founder of the wrestling federation that would eventually become first the WWF and then the WWE, passes away aged 69.

Standout Line

"Ah-ha! The dread "harmless boulder lying around minding its own business!" Have at you!!"

Walter Langkowski decides not to let his new status as a ghost in the machine bother him.  Right up until Aurora tells him she's not sure she can love him any more, that is. How fortunate that Bochs has overheard and explained how Aurora clearly can't love someone who isn't doing her on a regular basis.

ALF #24: "Final Conflict"

(Fear of a black-and-white planet.)

Comments

Well, this is a strange one.

It's not completely unprecedented in comic history for long-running storylines to suddenly and unexpectedly wrap up.  Unexpected re-shuffles, sudden cancellation, an unfortunate parallel to major news stories; there's plenty of reasons to toss off an ending.

None of that applies here, though. Neither the title nor Byrne's tenure is about to end, and we can safely assume that real-life tragedies involving gigantic Canadian demon-beasts were no more common in the mid-'80s than at any other time.  So what could have motivated Byrne to such lengths of break-neck pacing to clear his game board?

We'll get to that.  But let's not make the same mistake - let's take our time here.  The set-up to this story, for those who've forgotten, is that last issue Snowbird murdered Sasquatch after he was taken over by one of the seven Great Beasts she was born to defeat.  That was the fourth Beast to show up in Alpha Flight. The first, Tundra was beaten back to its home dimension in the first issue, a second was killed by Snowbird in the notorious "Snowblind" issue, and a third was somehow defeated using time-travel in a way I don't really understand (it's only here I learn that the "we must change nothing in the past" jaunt defeated the Beast in the first place; I must not have been paying attention, by which I mean I was actually taking plot logic at face value).

The remaining three beasts, along with Tundra, remain in their home dimension, which is also where Walter Langkowski's soul ended up after Snowbird gutted him.  Alpha's plan is therefore to breach this reality, slay the remaining beasts, and save Walter.  This actually goes some way towards lessening how terrible ALF #23 was, actually.  If Snowbird had always planned to head into the neighbouring dimension to slaughter her foes, her willingness to murder Walter is at least slightly mitigated by the knowledge she could restore him (having cast a spell on his body to crystallise it therefore preserve it - ice being so hard to get hold of in the Arctic Circle). You've still got the problem that Snowbird's mission is to destroy the Great Beasts and Aurora's is to save her lover's soul, with Talisman and Puck somewhere in the middle, but I guess killing someone and stealing from them are at least somewhat parallel goals.

Before they make their way into uncharted territory, though, the team needs back-up.  Talisman summons Shaman to open the doorway for them, but being untutored in the use of her powers, casts her net rather wide, causing Northstar (and ultimately Box) to show up as well. Typically, Jean-Paul has no interest in helping out, so Snowbird decides to dive into his brain and take over.  Which is disgraceful, obviously. It would be a terrible thing to do if Snowbird wanted Northstar to do the ironing, but her plan here is to force a man to risk his life in a fight he explicitly wanted no part of [1]. Shaman at least objects to the idea - he only likes controlling people by deliberately leaving out vital information required for informed consent - but it's quickly swept under the rug so the crusade can continue.

(On the other hand, Aurora punching Northstar straight in his sneering face?  Totally cool.)

With Heather staying behind to guard Walter's body, the team throw themselves through a variety of bizarre dimensions before they reach their destination.  When they get there, it proves to be a strange alien landscape entirely devoid of colour.

I actually really like this as an aesthetic. Like "Snowblind", one could uncharitably suggest this particular choice came down more to laziness and/or deadline issues rather than the desire to do something off the beaten path, but, also like "Snowblind", I don't particularly care. In an age filled with the kind of complicated graphical trickery we all take for granted - us, with our curse words and our bangy-bongy music of nothing - this kind of defiantly low-fi solution appeals to me, especially when Byrne is smart enough to lampshade it by having Puck admit he was expecting "a universe of swirling mists... or maybe a huge floating mouth with a highway leading out of it".

Lying in wait in this monochromatic hellhole are the surviving Great Beasts, including their master Somon.  Battle is quickly joined, but with an average of one giant horrific rampaging demon-thing per 1.5 heroes, things do not look good (it's even worse at base camp, where Box arrives just in time to watch Walter's crystalline body begin to crumble; once again we humbly point out the preservative qualities of frozen water).

Intermission

So it's heroes (and their mind-slaved plus one) ranked up against giant eating-type monsters.  Things look bleak.

Fortunately for Alpha Flight, they are not entirely without a plan.  Well, that's not entirely true. Shaman's plan is to distract and delay the Great Beasts from their own plans of stomping and smashing for long enough for Snowbird to turn into a white rabbit and then pull herself out of a hat.  This she does by exchanging barbs with Solon (the Greatest Great Beast) for a while, and becoming a bear and savaging him.  All rather abrupt, really, when you cut out the stilted smack-talk: Solon goes down and the Great Beasts tear each other to pieces without him to control them.

For those keeping score, this battle lasted for about nine pages, which seems like a fairly perfunctory ending for a storyline Byrne has been dipping into for the whole two years the title has been running.  Which I'll admit doesn't strike me as a huge problem, but I wonder if that's precisely because I've not been particularly engaged with ALF in general. Maybe if I'd had more invested in Snowbird and her quest to gradually take down the Great Beasts, a brief flurry of static panels followed by a bear attack might leave me feeling short-changed. As it is, I just find it slightly puzzling from an academic standpoint.

But then of course Snowbird's quest is no longer just about killing her ancestral foes.  There's a man's soul to be saved.  Unfortunately, she's forgotten this entirely, and has to be pulled back by Shaman as she tries to rip Solon to pieces, despite him being the only one who can locate Walter's soul.  So not only did she kill Walter, not only did she drag his friends into a battle with gigantic kill-beasts in the name of saving the soul of her victim, not only did she break into a former comrade's head to force him to risk his own life, she's then tries to massacre the only dude that can help her friends fulfil the mission for which they agreed to this insanely risky venture in the first place.

Let us all take a moment to consider how much Snowbird can go fuck herself.

Shaman manages to talk Snowbird-bear down in the end, though, and the captured Solon brings them to the Well of Sorrows, where lie the souls of the original inhabitants of this dimension (long ago wiped out by Solon and his mates), and also that of Walter Langkowski. Solon explains who must recover the soul, and Talisman, Aurora and Northstar descend into the depths.

But it's a trap, obviously. Another part of Solon lies within the well, and he quickly kills the interlopers.  Back above, Solon Alpha crows that technically he didn't lie (presumably because he didn't actually say "and there definitely isn't another piece of me in the well waiting to kill you all, if that's what your thinking").  Is there anyone alive stupid enough to think that excuse works?  I didn't technically lie?  It didn't work out for Mika in Paranormal Activity and it doesn't work here either. Maybe Solon assumed these goody two-shoes heroes would be forced to allow him such brazen trickery, but if so, he's pulling this shit in the wrong book; Snowbird immediately eviscerates him.

Not that that's much good to our three fallen friends. All that can save them now is an emergency soul transfusion.  Do we have any spare souls lying around?  Ah yes, Dr Langkowski, please float unsteadily forward.  The anima of everyone's favourite Beast knock-off was indeed at the well, just not inside it, and having seen his friends fall he gives of himself that they might live. Due to some metaphysical exchange rate that I won't even pretend to understand he's able to resurrect all three of them without passing beyond entirely, but what's left afterwards is some distance away from constituting a full whack.  Worse still, when the victorious Alphans return to our reality, they find Walter's body has crumbled to dust. [2]

This is where the sound of grinding story-gears becomes unbearable.  There's no reason whatsoever why Walter needed to sacrifice parts of his life force; the Solon trap was completely gratuitous.  There's no reason Walter's body needed to disintegrate; it fulfils no plot purpose.  This stuff transparently only happens so that Byrne can set up his Next Big Thing, which is to place what remains of Walter's soul in the "living metal" of Box, to give him a new body.

Let's leave aside the fact that this is ridiculous - this is a superhero comic, after all.  What's far more unforgivable about it is how unsatisfying the whole thing is.  In two issues Walter has been brutally, callously murdered and returned as a robot because... why? As far as I can tell, because Byrne got bored of him, got bored of Snowbird, and thought the best option all around was to revamp/write them out within as few pages as possible.  Snowbird ends this issue quitting the team to head for the house of the man she loves so he can "teach [her] how to be a woman" - I swear to God, that's an exact quote - and poor old Walter gets himself a shitty new existence as the bastard love child of Colossus and Oz's Tin Man. This is what Byrne figured had to be rolled out as quickly as possible?  This is why the final battle with the Great Beasts takes up approximately two Byrne-recap's worth of space?

Like I say, I don't really give much of a damn about what happens in this title, and I was still floored at how terrible an update/exit this was for Langkowski/Snowbird, respectively.  People who actually cared about these characters must have been reaching for the voodoo dolls.

[1] Note of course that this is a tricksy woman, once again, screwing over one of the noble males in Alpha Flight (albeit that this description applies less to Northstar than Puck or Sasquatch) .  Naturally Jean-Paul is immune to Snowbird's charms, forcing her to use her witchy mind-tricks, but the pattern most certainly still stands.

[2] Snowbird: killed Walter, dragged his friends into insane danger to try and resurrect him, forced a man to risk an agonising death to help save someone he hates, attempts to blow the entire plan for the sake of a quick kill, and fobs everyone off with a preservation spell that couldn't possibly have done the job it needed to. We reiterate: fuck Snowbird.

Clues

This story takes place in approximately real time.

Heather mentions that she lost her husband last year. This is a real problem considering he died in early March. There's very few places where we can extend the storyline, either; Byrne is far too fond of his interlocking storylines for that. Indeed, Heater also mentions it being only three days since she saw "Mac" on the streets, which, combined with the Sasquatch and Snowbird stories, makes things very tricky.  Whatever we decide here we're contradicting the text.

Indeed, we'll need to do some work just to deal with Heather's latter comment, which, referring as it does to an event two issues plus one crossover earlier, causes problems all its own. The simplest solution would seem to be to move Heather's sighting to the same day as Snowbird's collapse - since we've already split ALF #22 in two, we may as well do it with ALF #21 as well.  The result of this reordering puts things two days after Walter Langkowski's death.

Date

Thursday 10^th May 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+70.

Contemporary Events

Standout Line

"I'm sorry, I thought you understood what had transpired."

Snowbird adds passive-aggressive bullshit to her list of crimes as she patronisingly reiterates to Aurora exactly why she murdered her lover. Because she is a terrible person.

ALF #23: "Night Of The Beast"

(Sudden death.)

Comments

It seems I owe John Byrne an apology, or at least a partial one.  Apparently Aurora isn't the reason Walter Langkowski has been freaking out over the last few issues; she's just one of the triggers. Which perhaps isn't all that great of a distinction, but with so many reasons to knock this book, there's no reason to invent new ones.

So if Sasquatch isn't losing control because his girlfriend is socially castrating him (or at least, not just because of that), what really is going on? The gods that created Snowbird know; that's why they struck her down last issue. Which, let's note, is pretty crappy behaviour.  Why not just tell Snowbird what's going on, instead of smashing her to the ground in unbearable agony and then waiting a day to have another go?  Much as in Buffy, it would appear ancient beings of incredible power don't think resting the survival of humanity on a single young woman who didn't ask for the job should mean they can't be sneering pricks at the same time.

Still, whilst their communication skills are horribly sub-par, the message itself is an important one: Langkowski has been infiltrated by one of the seven Great Beasts Snowbird was born to stop, and at any moment it could take over completely.  One more transformation into Sasquatch could do it, if Walter suffers enough pain or anger to lose control.

Meanwhile, over at the private gym Alpha Flight is using to train in, the team hear tell of a super-villain smashing up local real estate, and spring into action - minus an exhausted Heather and the AWOL Snowbird.  When they get downtown to the disaster zone, they encounter Caliber, a quite hilariously terrible super-villain with cliche Ultron-knockoff armour and a line in unbearable dialogue.  He's awful, but deliberately so.  He's only there so he can shoot Sasquatch and cause enough pain for the monster inside him to wake, so he may as well be amusing in how crap he is.  It might be a cheap-shot to suggest a writer like Byrne is ideally suited to this kind of naff antagonist; at least the guy genuinely made me smile.

Caliber is dispatched in short order, but the team now have bigger problems.  Snowbird arrives and, seeing she is already too late, immediately dives in towards Sasquatch, intending to tear out his heart.

Here we have something of a problem, but we need to parse things out a little.  One might be tempted to point out that, once again, the team finds itself in trouble because one of its female members has suddenly become a liability/actively hostile - this is at minimum the fourth time this has happened, and writing out Heather this issue because she's "exhausted" after seeing someone who looks like her dead husband stinks as well - but that strikes me as unfair here.  Moments after her attack it transpires that Sasquatch really is now under the Great Beast's control. It's not clear Snowbird knew that, but given her magical nature there's no reason to assume she couldn't. At worst her crime here is to not explain what she's doing to her team-mates, but if she's hoping a surprise attack will work out for her, there isn't really time for a planning session.

So the problem doesn't come from Snowbird.  It's something deeper. For all that the Sasquatch freak-out storyline has been in play since issue #20, the sudden reveal that Sasquatch is possessed and must die now is unearned and cheap.  It's a crappy way to deal with a character that's been a mainstay of the book since it started.  There are plenty of examples in fiction of the possessed hero trope, and in pretty much all of them the audience gets the chance to process it, and the heroes get the chance to try and save them.  They might not always succeed, of course, but at least the poor schmuck under mystical control is shown to be important enough to be fought for. Here there are exactly six pages between Sasquatch revealing he is possessed and Snowbird tearing his heart out, killing the beast and Walter both.

Obviously I'm biased, with Walter being my favourite member of the team, but I feel comfortable stating that for any major character, killing them off with neither time to realise they are in danger nor mourn their passing is terrible writing.  And yes, the issue ends with the team deciding to quest for Walter's soul, but with his body and superhuman identity gone, there's a pretty low ceiling on how much this can mitigate the central problem here.

The circumstances of the crisis raises problems as well. If Snowbird's gods had explained the situation a day earlier instead of slapping her around, she could have warned Walter to remain in his human form and everything would have been OK.  Worse, since we now know every loss of control Sasquatch suffered brought him closer to being taken over, it makes Aurora's flagrant disregard for his feelings a central contribution to his death.  Given the problems this book demonstrates around women in general and Aurora specifically, that's really something we could have done without.  Lastly, and probably least importantly, for all that I fully support the idea that villains placed in a narrative for mechanistic reasons should probably be corny and naff, when that mechanistic reason is setting in motion the death of a main character, I'm not sure how well that idea holds up.

So, yeah.  It's not very good.  There was no reason to rush through so important an event, and the end result is the distinct feeling that Byrne is too excited to get to what comes next for poor old Walter to give the character's original iteration the send-off he deserves, and his fans the pay-off they've more than earned.

Clues

This story takes place over the course of a few hours.  It kicks off the day after Snowbird's collapse, which itself we're assuming occurs a day after XAA wraps up.

Date

Tuesday 8^th May 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+68.

Contemporary Events

The USSR announces they will boycott the '84 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.  Despite having existed for two years at this point, Channel 4 do not offer up an embryonic form of "Gay Mountain" in response.  Thirty more years must pass before people are ready for that.

Standout Line

"Thus, let a technicality provide us with the means to destroy the beast..." - Snowbird.

ALF #22: "Rub-Out"

("If only I could be as cool as you.")

Comments

There are two obvious conclusions to draw from this issue.  The first is that Northstar is an arsehole.  The second is that John Byrne is an arsehole.

Neither of these, strictly speaking, can properly be called a revelation. It's the depth of nastiness here that is remarkable. Northstar we can at least forgive for failing to phone Sasquatch when Aurora (now once more calling herself Jeanne-Marie) arrives after three days of solid flying.  Not because it isn't a supreme dick move, but because he's fictional. Alas, to our eternal chagrin, the same cannot be said of Byrne.

This month's adventure takes place at a circus.  Alarm bells are already ringing, because the X-books don't do to well with circus stories. Mesmero didn't do UXM any favours, and the Wolverine & The X-Men story in which our heroes tried to deal with Frankenstein's monster inside an insane carnival was simply too bonkers to be processed by mortal minds. More than that, though, it's something of a problematic fit; bringing a group of people derided as freaks to a circus and extracting entertainment from them.  Perhaps there's a slightly problematic form of voyuerism that taints the entirety of superhero comics, when I come to think about it, but it's most obvious when you put the carnival barkers in the foreground.

Of course, there are very few situations Byrne cannot take and make much, much worse.  Here, the plot is not so much circuses are fun and so are costumed misfits, it's that circuses are dangerous because the freaks who live there are murderous scum.  When Jean Paul answers his friend Clementine's cry for help, he heads to her circus with Jeanne-Marie in tow, to discover "Clemmy" has lost control of her business to the villainous Pink Pearl.

As the cover above makes clear, Pink Pearl is not your average lady.  She is rather... expansive.  The script takes as many opportunities to point this out as possible.  Pearl's real name is "Pearl Gross". She can't be killed with knifes because she's just too well-padded. She defeats her enemies by smothering them in her not inconsiderable belly. When she does this to Jeanne-Marie, she awakens as Aurora with no memory of what just transpires, and immediately labels Pearl "obscene."  In other words, it's not just that this woman with her unorthodox body shape is an evil, violent bully, her mere existence is somehow a problem independent of her nature.

This is, simply put, disgusting, and no-one with the wherewithal to have reached this blog needs me to explain why. Nor is Pearl the only example of this abominable attitude; merely the most prominent. The "it's 1985" excuse ain't gonna cut it either, not when Tod Browning had blown the lid off this particular line of bullshit back in 1932.

In the wake of all this unpleasantness, the actual plot seems beside the point, but for the record, Pearl has taken over Clementine's circus so that she can bomb an upcoming summit between the US President and the Canadian Prime Minister. She's confident that if the if the bomb gets traced back to the circus, the authorities will assume Clementine is to blame, owing to her youthful activities with the Quebec Sepratiste movement. Essentially this simply serves as a vehicle by which the plot can reveal Jean-Paul was also a member of the movement, though apparently as part of a less violent cell than Clementine's, who used to blow up post-boxes (whether this was intended to injure those nearby is not stated).  Usually so transparent a move to reach a revelation would bother me, especially since Jean-Paul doesn't admit to his involvement, Aurora infers it from the astonishingly scant evidence that Jean-Paul is fiercely pro-Quebec and knows a woman revealed to be an ex-terrorist. Given how utterly wretched this issue's story has been in every other way, though, it's blatant nature as an excuse for Northstar's sister to out him as a former terrorist ranks among the very least of its problems.

Issue rating: a thousand "ughs".

Meanwhile, in subplot corner, Heather is convinced she sees her dead husband Mac on the rainy streets of Vancouver, and Madison Jeffries helps Robert Bochs put together the final touches on the new improved Box model, AKA Middle-Age Colossus.

With beta testing finally complete, it's time to embark on a mission of retribution.  Mac's death shall at last be avenged!

Clues

Aurora/Jeanne-Marie states it took almost three days for her to reach Northstar.  Since it's apparently evening when she arrives, we'll assume we're only two calendar days further on from when she met Gilded Lily. This story then continues into the following day.

Once again Byrne wishes us to believe it is winter. Once again, this is utterly compatible with his own story. We could, I suppose, insert several months into the story between Aurora's arrival and the circus plot, but that leaves Sasquatch (and Snowbird) hanging for too long. There's also a reference here to the Canadian government changeover in September 1984, when the Progressive Conservative Party (now there's an oxymoron for you) took power in a landslide. As always here, actual historical events don't factor into our analysis, but it's an interesting background detail.

Northstar mentions it's been months since he last saw his sister.  The adventure he refers to is Contest of Champions, which is considered the first ever superhero crossover event, but which I decided lay outseid the remit of this blog, containing as it does nothing that effects our merry mutants even in the short term.  Nevertheless, this reference suggests that CoC lies between ALF #8 and this issue, which in turn means months must have passed since ALF #8. Our timeline has this gap as being nine months, so that's all entirely cool.

(Of course by Bryne's own reckoning it should be well over a year, but there you go.)

Date

Saturday 21^st to Sunday 22^nd of April, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+51 to X+6Y+52.

Contemporary Events

Thriller ends an astonishing 37-week run at the top of the US album charts when the Footloose soundtrack knocks it from the pedestal.

Standout Line

"And just what is Jean-Paul doing here? With a woman!" - Aurora

For all the (deserved) kicking Byrne is getting elsewhere on this blog, I continue to give him credit for making Northstar's sexual orientation almost impossible to miss.

ALF #21: "...Love Wrought New Alchemy..."

(Actually, it should probably be "don't's".)

Comments

(We're skipping NMU #26 for now, since it explicitly takes place after UXM # 193).

Good morning class. Please take your coats off and sit down. Shooter! Stop flipping off your classmates, you need to learn how to get along. Straczynski; you shouldn't even be in this class, so hop it.

Today we'll be - put those toys away, Mantlo - today we'll be having another lesson on the dos and don'ts of comics.  Once again, we'll be using Byrne's homework as a test case. Don't start sniffling, Byrne!  If you didn't want a bit of constructive criticism you shouldn't have turned in a confused sexist mess every week last term.

Headmaster Lee mentioned at briefing that he'd like us to practice the "praise sandwich" method when critiquing our students' work, but that would ruin the structure of my comments, and that I shall not abide!

Ahem.

Don't structure an issue of a comic so that a villain explaining their origins and plan takes up more space than the villain being defeated by your heroes. If you spend nine pages on a flashback to explain how your villain has lived for centuries through their insane experiments, don't spend four pages from the moment your hero meets her to her abject defeat.

And on the subject of flashbacks, young Byrne:

Don't slap your heroes on the cover fighting a villain who only appears in flashback. If your story isn't interesting enough to find a scene to advertise it fairly, then rewrite your story.

On the other hand, do try pulling some artistic flourishes in your flashback scenes.  Sepia-toned images? Lovely. Never showing Gilded Lily's face after her 1875 car accident so as to leave it ambiguous when things went south for her?  Very nice.

Which reminds me:

Do just suddenly have a character revealed to not be a human but a decapitated emaciated face and lungs atop a robot with wheels.  That's just so gloriously insane it gives me shivers. I don't know if Diablo built her or if she's been replacing pieces of herself for the last century, but then that's what's so great about it.

But don't have her defeated instantly by removing her mask.  See earlier comments. If you have to choose between cutting short the climactic throw-down between hero and villain and truncating the tale of a villain we've never seen or heard of before and who you're going to kill off, for God's sake choose the Tale of How I Went Mad and Murderous. Also, don't take your heroines mental troubles - which you're already on thin ice about, Byrne; we've talked about this before - and use it as an excuse as for why she's suddenly completely helpless and needs her boyfriend to effortlessly rescue her.  This is a modern classroom, Byrne, and I expect contemporary attitudes! Even though I refer to you all by your surnames!

(Oh, and don't give her a terrible approximation at a phonetic stereotype of a French person massacring English.  You'll give Claremont ideas.)

For the love of God, Byrne, don't use nine pages for your first flashback and then take up another page so as to explain what happened last issue. After spending almost half the issue explaining how Gilded Lily got and used her powers, we hardly need it explained what happened to Sasquatch.  Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, don't stick in a page about Snowbird feeling ill.  You've already compromised your structure all to pot. No sense making a bad situation worse, for all that you seem determined to make that your motif.

Right.  That about does it for Mr Byrne.  No sense sulking, young man. If you wanted to avoid these sessions, you should just stop writing sexist stupidly-paced nonsense.  Let's move on to our next subject: uses and misuses of the splash page. Oh stop smirking, Land!

Clues

This story takes place in approximately real time.

Date

Thursday 19^th April, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+49.

Contemporary Events

Daniel Whitmire and Albert Jackson publish their theory of "Nemesis the Death Star", which according to them orbits the Sun at a range of tens of thousands of AU, entering the Oort cloud once every 26 million years and sending a wave of comets into the solar system to create all sorts of unpleasantness.

No proof of the existence of Nemesis has ever been found, which makes the whole idea delightfully wacky and unhinged.  One wonders Stargate's Daniel Jackson was named in honour of these two astronomical pioneers of weird.

Standout Line

You need the panels for this one, really.

Such horrible, sad last words. Chilling.

(On the other hand, having her death destroy both her lab of unnerving delights and the strange house around her just feels like lazy end-tying.)

ALF #20: "Gold And Love Affairs!"

(Sometimes it's hard to not be a woman)

Comments

We seem, at last, to have followed the downward spiral into outright self-parody.  Which afflicts a great many ongoing stories, of course, some of them much better than this. In this case, it seems to be a descent into hitherto undreamed of levels of sexist bilge, which means it's not merely unenjoyable, but hard to laugh at, too.  Really, anger seems like the only appropriate response.

Let's start with the B-plot here, since that continues the story from the last two issues. After their jaunt to the past, Alpha Flight finally have themselves some time to discuss what's happened and decide on what to do next.  Unfortunately, what Snowbird and Shaman want to do most is bicker over who and what Shaman's daughter is and represents. They do this in front of Talisman, ignoring her entirely. When she calls them on this, pointing out she has no interest in being part of some hinky prophecy, her attempts to remove the tiara that started this whole business leaves her in agonising pain.  The tiara can't be taken off!

Whereupon Shaman says "I wish there had been more time to inform you of what you faced".  Let's just stop here, for a little while, and absorb the full horror of this.  Shaman knew that his daughter - a daughter he had just been reunited with that day after a decade and a half of estrangement - wouldn't be able to return to her normal life - the life she chose - and would instead have to remain forever in the mystical world he is part of, and he didn't tell her because there wasn't time?  There aren't enough fields in Texas for the amount of bullshit I'm calling on that. Their visit to the past accomplished nothing beyond filling in gaps for the curious. Shaman explicitly states they had to ensure they didn't change anything, making the whole jaunt an intelligence gathering trip.  This is supposed to have been so important there was no time to tell his daughter about what she was letting herself in for? Is there any more stupid insistence than we must time-travel to the past immediately? Fuck, as they say, that noise.

It's very difficult to get past all this. A father decides his daughter's entire future, knowing full well it cannot be changed, and goes ahead with it without letting his daughter make an informed choice because he can't wait to get to his own shit? That's obscene. But does Elizabeth object to or even note any of this? Dear reader, she does not.

But Shaman isn't finished with his patriarchal shit-show just yet. He's noticed Puck making eyes at Heather as she slowly begins to rebuild her life after her husband's death. This, he concludes, cannot be allowed to go on without comment. Once Heather leaves to try and get hold of Walter Langkowski over living arrangements, Shaman corners Puck in the kitchen. There, he informs him he knows Puck's feelings, suspects Heather might one day feel the same way, and tells him to make sure when Heather "needs someone again", he makes sure he gives everything to make sure she's OK.

Looked at from some angles, this might not seem too bad. We can dispense with the "all this proves Shaman is sexist, not the story" argument straight away, of course - if a story keeps hitting the same beat and nothing is provided as push-back, the specific source of those beats is irrelevant - but one can take the position that a guy discussing with his friend how to best handle his feelings for a devastated widow is completely reasonable.

As an isolated incident, that might even work out. Shaman's advice is unsolicited, but other than that, I've had plenty of conversations with friends of both sexes that run along roughly similar lines. Coming just two pages after we learn what Shaman has allowed to happen to his own daughter, I'm far less prepared to be forgiving, particular since his meddling is taking place in a comic that repeatedly suggests that women are all just crazy, broken and emotionally unavailable in different ratios, and it's simply a man's job to suffer through the resulting storms.

Look. I'm not going to pretend I don't get it.  As a younger man, I was found women in a mess to be attractive - of course in retrospect,  they all just happened to be physically attractive as well; how surprising - so I can't claim complete innocence. And it's certainly true that if you're going to write melodrama, there's a damn good chance any given pairing is going to involve a lot of navigating emotional baggage. It'd be nice if the way fiction tends to portray a man's baggage so very differently to that of a woman, but that's a much broader problem that I'm not inclined to heap on Byrne in 1985, not when there's so much bigger problems here.

The real complaint here is that this shtick has become pathological.  Moving to the A plot, we see exactly the same concept being played out; messing with Aurora's power set (which, remember, Sasquatch did whilst not telling her what he was doing, and with no idea as to whether his meddling could be reversed; sound familiar?) is causing her unexpected problems.  Specifically, she's complaining all the time and making out with other men in front of Sasquatch, "for fun", all whilst wearing an utterly ridiculous costume.

Super-speed presumably comes in handy
during extended bikini-wax sessions

While all of this is going on, Walter is struggling to control a series of terrible rages that have started befalling him.  These rages are making it hard to keep his mind on the serious business of helping people, but oddly enough they never happen while he's by himself.

Let's all try as hard as we can to think what could possibly be upsetting him.  What "outside power" as he puts it could possibly be driving him crazy and unable to focus on doing good?  I've never read these Alpha Flight issues before, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong, but if this doesn't turn out to be over how his girlfriend has turned into a dirty slutty slut getting her slutty slutness all over the place, I'll be amazed. Relieved, but amazed.

The two lovers head off the next day to some property Walter owns on Vancouver Island, to see whether it will work as a base for Alpha Flight. Sure, he hasn't seen it in thirty years, and the locals all say the place is haunted by the nine-times widowed woman who lived there until the '20s, but who believes in ghosts twenty-four hours after their friends fought a hideous demon?

In fairness to Walter, though, it's not a spirit that haunts the house, though that's only because the widow from fifty-five years earlier is still alive. As well as a freakishly long life-span - she wears a gold mask, so its impossible to tell how well she's holding up - it turns out she has a nasty habit of turning her husbands into gold statues. A villainous woman who literally reduces the men she marries into nothing but wealth? How...inevitable.

(She can cloak people in utter darkness as well, apparently entirely so that Byrne can repeat his "Snowblind" joke with thought bubbles in otherwise completely black panels. If you're wondering if the joke works so well when you replace super-punching with a woman attempting to avoid severe psychological damage, the answer is no.)

In conclusion, then: Byrne turns in his most sexist issue yet, and spends so much time laying out said sexism that it takes sixteen pages for the story to start. Then that story is immediately sexist.  Goddamn.

Clues

Elizabeth Twoyoungmen notes that only 72 hours ago she was still a college student, which suggests three days have passed since she became Talisman.  The theme of oncoming winter once more appears, but we've dealt with the problems of this idea before.

The story itself straddles two days.

Date

Wednesday 18^th to Thursday 19^th April, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+48 to X+6Y+49.

Contemporary Events

The police siege of the Libyan Embassy in London is in the second of its eleven days, with WPC Yvonne Fletcher having been shot and killed the morning before by machine-gun fire from the first floor of the Embassy.

Standout Line

"Elizabeth was raised within the whiteman's culture. To her mind -- and rightly so -- there is only one place in history for a Messiah. " - Shaman.

I didn't mention this in the comments, because I wanted to focus on the gender politics, but what exactly is this line supposed to mean? I can't decide whether its a vote for assimilation into majority culture, or just a ridiculous non sequitur.

ALF #19: "Turn Again, Turn Again, Time In Thy Flight"

("But you can't rewrite history! Not one line!")

Comments

ALF #19 is the title's first time-travel story, in which Shaman takes his daughter into the past - along with Snowbird and Puck - to try and discover how Lucas Stang's demon problems first kicked off.

It's also the issue in which we learn Elizabeth Twoyoungmen is the subject of a millennia-old prophecy. This is actually the least interesting aspect of the issue, so we'll deal with it fairly briefly. Prompted by her father, Elizabeth reaches into his medicine bag, and pulls out a tiara that transforms her into the sorceress Talisman. In theory, this is a useful idea, because it takes the standard trope of alienated family members learning what they have in common and compresses it into a single panel: Elizabeth is now a magic-user like her father.  In practice what happens is that Talisman is so powerful and ethereal she's impossible to relate to, and Shaman spends the whole issue alternating between freaking out over his daughter's transformation and refusing to help her with it.  "No time to explain now!" is a fucking awful thing to say to your daughter (estranged or otherwise) when she clearly needs help adjusting to an utterly unexpected life-changing event.

But then Shaman doesn't come off well here across the board. He hands the medicine bag to Elizabeth without warning her that if she isn't actually Talisman looking into the bag will drive her insane.  That seems like a pretty important thing to point out, but Shaman's only comment is the fact his daughter hasn't just had her mind sucked away into nothingness is further proof that Snowbird has the right person.  Once Elizabeth has become Talisman, and Shaman has taken the group into the past, he then commences lying to people - mainly by omission, but directly to Snowbird - about what their mission is.

Snowbird, you see, thinks they're there to stop Ranaq the Devourer from achieving corporeal form in the first place; to stop him gaining the foothold into the real that led to the supernatural egg-based battle in the previous issue. Shaman assures her this is the plan, but it isn't. Shaman doesn't believe the past can be changed, and is just hoping to learn the circumstances of Ranaq's arrival to more usefully battle him in the present.

This is more or less in keeping with the original Marvel policy on time-travel, which stated that one could not change the past to alter the future. Rather, an attempt at time-travel creates a new reality, one which then operates entirely independently.  Shaman's non-interference policy is presumably intended to ensure he and his companions can return to the same Earth they left behind.

The problem here of course is that it's obvious nonsense.  I'm not talking about the multi-dimensional approach to time travel; that seems as sensible a way as any to handle the idea in a setting multiple authors. Nor am I particularly interested in exploring whether total non-interaction following a trip into the past would get one around the reality-hopping issue - though one would think it wouldn't, since the new dimension should be created by the act of travel itself, not by what happens once that act is finished.  There's no need to look at that too deeply because the idea of total non-interaction is so obviously ridiculous in the first place.

What needs to be understood here is that what causality considers interference bears no relation to what the human mind considers interference. Heisenberg's observer effect tells us that, as does basic common sense. The world they return to must be different to the one they left - it is inescapable.  The best one can hope for is a world indistinguishable from the one they left behind.

None of this seems apparent to Shaman, who seems relatively unconcerned with the idea of his companions fighting Ranaq, so long as none of them actually defeat him (that honour goes to the young Lucas Stang, who banishes Ranaq and so ensures the rematch one hundred years later).  That's an insane solipsistic approach to time-travel - what matters must be ensuring the event they came to witness goes ahead. Yes, that goal can be considered as an attempt to avoid a Grandfather Paradox, but really, that's just further evidence of why the Grandfather Paradox is so unworkable in the first place. Any reasonable conception of the idea has to include it being paradoxical for a time-traveller to succeed in changing what they want changing, and that immediately dilutes the laws of causality with the petty drudgery of the human mind.

It is simply not workable that what a time-traveller can do should be determined by what they know.  The past cannot possibly become more flexible in areas the time-traveller is less expert. Going back to change what we ate for breakfast yesterday should not be harder to do than going back to change what we had ten years ago just because we don't remember the specifics of the latter. The past is mutable or it is not, and in the case of Shaman's excursion, the former is clearly the one that holds.  Some attempt to bypass this fact by arguing time is like a jigsaw puzzle that always works out in the end (Pratchett specifically states that this is how things work with the Discworld, but that strikes me more as an attempt to avoid having to come up with anything more complicated, which; fair enough), but that won't cut it either.

Let's say I write two letters to my young self, one free of useful knowledge and another mapping out the mistakes I've made in the last twenty years, and place them in identical envelopes. Then I choose one at random, head back into the past, and post it. The argument that both letters are "destined" to be somehow intercepted or destroyed is very unpersuasive, but the suggestion only the "useful" letter would meet that fate is less sensible still.

No, if the past can be reached at all, if we really can traipse our way back down the highway of causality and poke at what we find there, the Grandfather Paradox cannot hold - one of the reasons I like Marvel's time-travel policy as much as I do, though it's been some time since it was rigorously maintained.  Shaman's touch-but-don't-stop policy simply doesn't cut it.

Still, by the end of the issue everyone's back in the present. It may even be the same present. We can dispense with all this noodling about the nature of time-travel and get down to something simpler, like how do deal with vengeful women turning people into gold. How relaxing that will be.

Clues

This story takes place in approximately real time. Plus, obviously, the past.

Date

Monday 15^th April, 1884.

X-Date

X-94Y+45.

Contemporary Events

The Siege of Khartoum enters its second month, and Adolf Luderitz prepares to place his South-West African holdings (now part of modern-day Namibia) under the protection of Imperial Germany to deter British aggression.

Standout Line

"Time travel is one of the few things I haven't tried." - Puck.

ALF #18: "How Long Will A Man Lie In The Ground 'Ere He Rot"

("My God! Look at all the junk food!")

Comments

This is another of Byrne's multi-thread spectaculars, so much as we did with NMU #23, we'll discuss the main story here and then summarise the various offshoot scenes in Subplot Corner.

Ever since this blog began I've been running the "contemporary events" section, in which I nod to historic events concurrent with what I'm suggesting individual comics can be argued to have been set.  Well, one month exactly after Sunspot first felt the effects of acute Cloakism, and during the filming of Dazzler's intended debut feature, Columbia Pictures released Ghostbusters.

The effect of Ghostbusters upon pop culture is well-known, of course; as Spike said in Buffy, the phrase "Who you gonna call" is now forever entirely unuseable in its intended context.  There's also a clear link between the film and this issue. Again, comics borrowing from genre classics is hardly something of a surprise (it seems to me impossible to argue the issue of UXM involving Kitty being stalked by a N'Garai demon wasn't inspired in its entirety by Alien), but the link here is unusual because Byrne has made so odd a choice over what to ape.  He has seemingly no interest in this

or this

or this

or even this

All he cares about is riffing on this:

"Yay! Smaller gas bills!"

A strange choice for an image to replicate, one might think.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Our main plot here follows on from the sudden appearance of Shaman’s daughter, who after years of estrangement needs her father’s help.  As before, it’s difficult to get fired up by the return of Michael’s long-lost daughter because she’s so horribly unpleasant.  The fact that Michael lost his daughter’s trust and love when she was a child because his promise to save her sick mother came to nothing just about works as a beat in a frankly pretty clichéd “Arrogant man of science is brought low and embraces mysticism” way – and by clichéd I mean Marvel has done the exact same plot with a surgeon turned magician already – but bringing her back is a clear mistake.  There’s just no way to get past the fact that someone old enough to vote is treating her father like shit because medical technology only goes so far.  The only words that should be coming out of Elizabeth’s mouth are “Dad, I’m so sorry you had to lose your wife and your daughter on the same day”, and until she offers those up, she can engage in indefinite fucking off.

Shaman investigates the skull his daughter unearthed a few days earlier, and returns a judgement of angry, presumed evil. With nothing else to go on, the two Twoyoungmen head to the police station to await developments. 

It doesn't take long.  Let's head on over to the Stang place, where old Mister Stang - a bastard of the uppermost crotchetiness - is mulling over whether one hundred and seventeen years is far too long a time to spend amongst us.  All that's keeping him in this vale of tears is the love of his great-grandaughter Emily, the only member of his family he hasn't yet chased away. His bitter cynicism leads him to conclude she made contact a year earlier in the hopes of squeezing some money out of him, but apparently she's just genuinely a nice person - surprising given the writer and the chromosone combination.  Her reward is to be attacked by her own scrambled eggs.

So. The thing. It's possible here that Byrne intends for a woman being threatened by the beaten results of chicken ovulation to be funny.  He's playing it exceptionally straight, yes, but that hardly invalidates the comedy theory.  But, there's a limit here.  There's playing things straight, and there's playing things lumpen and dead.  I mean, check this exchange out:

Lucas Stang's great-granddaughter just called up in a major panic. Somthing about her scrambled eggs attacking her!

Yes... yes, that sounds like the kind of thing I've been expecting.  Eggs, after all, have the dubious distinction of representing both new life... and the promise of life unfulfilled.

I simply cannot believe that Byrne wrote that thinking it to be comedy gold.  Of course, before reading this issue, I don't think that anyone could have written those words in that order at all.  So what do I know?

Shaman and Elizabeth teleport their way over to the Stang residence and launch their attack on the world's most violent breakfast. It turns out the eggs are accessing an alternative dimension and using its energies to grow at an alarming rate.  If things aren't brought to a stop soon, the portal could widen to the point where all life on the planet is destroyed. If you want a vision of such a future, imagine evil squamous scrambled eggs everywhere, forever.  Not particularly keen on this idea, Shaman slams shut the portal. 

Things don't end there, though. Shaman is concerned. What if the expanding death-eggs were only a diversion? Upstairs, they find Lusas Stang, surrounded by the white light of Impending Evil.  Apparently Stang has been waiting one hundred years for the spirits to come mess his family up, which is why he's been doing his damndest to keep anyone he cares about away and safe.  Since Emily is here, though, Lucas decides she might as well die first and save him.  Which I assure you makes no more sense on the page than it does in summary.  Maybe if Byrne had had more space he could have explained more thoroughly - God knows, extensive explanations are usually his most favourite thing ever - but then that would have meant cutting down on the scrambled egg fight scene, and nobody would have wanted that.

Anyway, so it is that Emily first becomes possessed by Ranaq, the Gerat Devourer, and then starts trying to kill Elizabeth with villanous demonic eye-beams.  Elizabeth's latent mystical powers trigger in response, setting up a supernatural duel that could kill either or both women, so Shaman steps in to expel Ranaq without hurting Emily. Always nice when a man can save a helpless woman, especially one so beautiful but haunted by demons, and over the efforts of some other woman to, like, totally overract.

(Some may argue at this point I'm just twisting things to take cheap shots at Byrne.  Others will realise the fact Byrne's work can be so quickly and easily twisted is a valid criticism in itself).

With Emily saved and Stang still alive (albeit catatonic), the immediate danger is passed. This week's episode of When Haunted Skulls Get Pissy isn't quite over yet, though.  For their next trick, the amazing Shaman and his lovely daughter will wow you with their greatest feat of all - a pilgrimage 100 years back in time in order to slap around the Ghost of Angry Mr Stang Past.

We're going all wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.  Pass the 3D specs and hold on tight.

Meanwhile...

In subplot one, we learn that those who might claim Byrne cannot multitask are sadly mistaken. This conversation between Heather and Judd combines both the former’s plans for rebuilding Alpha Flight and a remarkable degree of product placement.  I don’t know how much McDonald’s paid for John Byrne’s immortal soul, but I bet they’d been hoping for Claremont. If they’d caught that fine fat fish, imagine how different eighties culture could have been.

Heather starts off by phoning up former members of the team, hoping she can put together a more centralised unit (why this is useful when half your team can get across Canada almost immediately and the other half need to hitch lifts on aeroplanes isn’t explained).  Northstar rudely refuses (though how cool is it that he has a nearly-naked young man answering his phone for him?)  and Shaman, of course, isn’t about.

(Just as an aside: what the heck  is “Where the heck is High River?” all about? Any knowledgeable Canadians in my audience?)

The second subplot concerns poor old Douglas Thompson, who waits in the wilderness hoping to meet the woman he once knew – and still loves – as Anne McKenzie, now revealed as Snowbird.  He’s been waiting for days for a response on his admission of love.  It’s not really too nice to leave someone hanging like that – though I can’t claim to be objective on that point, which is all I’m going to say – but worse is to come when she returns to tell him she does love him but it can never work because she’s all messed up and yadda yadda.  When will emotionally distant women stop tormenting poor pure-hearted men? Seriously, does anyone know if Byrne ever got therapy over his fixation with implausibly curvaceous but emotionally difficult women?  Because damn.

(Oh, and for bonus ick factor, we should note that when Snowbird tells Doug she can't love him, he responds by grabbing her and forcibly kissing her. Because how can a woman knows how she really feels without a man sexually assaulting her so she knows what she's missing?  The idea people still wrote this crap within my lifetime is genuinely depressing.)

Clues

This story takes place over a single day. Dr Twoyoungmen's receptionist states it's been two days since his daughter arrived, placing this issue one day after the conclusion of ALF #16. That would make it something like eight days since Doug made his feelings known to Snowbird, which seems a bit long. But clearly Byrne wants to suggest this man is suffering unbearably for the crime of loving a woman, and we should respect that.

Well, not respect it, obviously, but factor it in. Hell, Byrne wrote that Doug's confession happened in early Spring, and claims this issue that Canada is getting its first taste of winter. We're ignoring this idea because it makes no sense to the wider timeline (ALF #15 would have to stretch over eight months), but it gives you some idea of how ludicrous the Snowbird storyline has become.

Date

Sunday 15^th April, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+45.

Contemporary Events

Forty train stations in the Punjab are plundered by extremist Sikhs.

Standout Line

"M-my scrambled eggs...!?!?"