I just remembered yet another John Byrne fiasco (the king of cracktastic plotlines), this time for “Alpha Flight”:
Okay, when the Canada’s Mightiest Heroes got their own book, precious little of their backstory was known. The first year of issues gave us lots of background and it quickly became apparent that the team’s leader Guardian (nee ‘Vindicator’) was the only member who fit the tradional mold of a superhero in that he created a super-powered combat suit with the express purpose of combatting the Forces of Evil. The rest of the team tended to be a collection of eccentrics & neurotics who had super-powers and more often than not stumbled into encounters with a variety of weird menaces.
In #12, Guardian (real name: James-MacDonald Hudson) was killed in an encounter with Omega Flight (a collection of embittered ex-recruits of the Department H program that initially assembled Alpha Flight). At that point, without Gaurdian to rally them together, Alpha-Flight seemed unlikely to carry on as a team - they had no central HQ, few of the members had any particular desire to go crimefighting, and several team-members didn’t even like each other. That’s when Heather Hudson, Guardian’s widow and a non-powered supporting character who had previously not had demonstrated any professional crimefighting abilities, takes it upon herself to lead the team! Well, crazier things have happened than a bystanding civilian leading a superhero team. Amazingly, she does get the team to function more like a genuine superhero team.
And then Heather starts seeing glimpses of her late husband in crowds. the rest of Alpha thinks she’s losing her mind, but then Guardian shows up alive! Guardian explains to his wife that the explosion that literally burnt him to cinders really catapulted him through time & space to the moon of Jupiter several million years before humans even existed. Guardian is found, kept alive by some race that happens to live there then. They put Guardian into suspended animation so that he wakes up just after the point in time in which he supposedly was killed (and when he awakens, he finds out that the race that sustained him had been wiped out), and he rockets back to Earth. Guardian spent months surreptitiously watching his wife from a distance, but was afraid to actually just come up and say “hi!” to her. Why? Well, the aliens who nursed Guardian back to health had found him in a very injured state AND they’d never seen a human before, so that they couldn’t tell what parts of him were organic and what parts of him were his high-tech battlesuit. So they improvised and rebuilt him as a cybornetic monstrosity - part man, part machine and ugly. (Hmmm, you say, someone watched the original “Star Trek” pilot and hoped nobody who read ‘Alpha-Flight’ had).
Anyway, that supremely convoluted, derivitive and waaaaaaayyyy implausible explanation as to how Guardian survived the explosion was - in the very next issue no less! - revealed to be all just a bunch of hooeey. “Guardian” was actually a robot imposter helping Omega Flight lure the rest of Alpha Flight into an extremely lame trap.
At which point, I (and I suspect many, many, many other folks) had had enough of John Byrne’s inane writing and stopped reading Alpha-Flight.
