ALPHA FLIGHT SPECIAL #1 REVIEW: BEFORE THE LEGENDS, THERE WAS THE FIRST FLIGHT

WEPAAAA! Alpha Flight Special #1 is one of those Marvel books that feels like somebody opened a dusty filing cabinet marked “stuff we probably should have told you years ago” and found a whole damn origin story sitting inside. Scott Lobdell and Simon Furman, working with artist Pat Broderick, rewind the clock to the earliest days of Department H, before Alpha Flight became the team most readers knew, and give us James Hudson trying to build Canada’s first super-team out of a collection of gifted people who are talented, dangerous and very much not ready to become a family. That right there is the hook. This is not the polished Alpha Flight. This is the prototype, and prototypes get messy.

Lobdell and Furman keep the story moving by treating Hudson’s dream like something admirable and a little insane at the same time. James believes Canada needs its own answer to the superhero age, so he starts assembling people who could become protectors if they can survive the training, the personalities and each other. Wolverine is already Wolverine, which means Logan has exactly zero patience for speeches, bureaucracy or anybody trying to tell him what kind of man he is supposed to become. Around him you’ve got Snowbird, Saint Elmo, Smart Alec, Groundhog and Stitch, each bringing a different power set and a different problem to the room. The fun is watching the team exist before the legend has settled over them. Nobody knows what Alpha Flight is yet. Hell, half of them barely know if they even want the job.

Where this joint really starts cooking is when all that little training-room tension stops being cute and turns into, “Oh nah, this is actually dangerous now.” All that talk about teamwork gets thrown out the window real quick once the mission goes sideways, because putting a bunch of powerful people in the same room and calling them a team don’t mean shit if they don’t trust each other. Logan is pure instinct and attitude, ready to solve everything with claws and bad intentions. Hudson is trying to keep some kind of order without looking like he’s losing the room. Snowbird is operating on a whole other wavelength, bringing that mystical energy nobody else fully knows what to do with, while the rest of the crew are still trying to prove they even deserve to be there. Then Egghead comes through with a stolen nuclear missile and suddenly this ain’t orientation anymore, fam. This is “we might lose a whole city if y’all don’t get your shit together.” That’s when you finally see what this first Alpha Flight is built from. Some step up. Some fold. Some make the kind of choices that tell you exactly why this version of the squad was never built to last.

Pat Broderick’s art? Man, this is that thick early-’90s Marvel look where everybody got shoulders like linebackers, machinery looks like it weighs twelve tons, and Wolverine is built like somebody compressed pure anger into a yellow costume. I’m here for it. Broderick gives the action some real heft, but the best part is he doesn’t let the pages turn into a damn mess just because everybody has powers going off at once. Missiles, explosions, villains, Snowbird changing forms, Logan slicing through the situation like he got somewhere else to be, and I can still follow the damn thing. That matters. And the faces actually work too. Hudson looks like a man trying to hold a plan together with duct tape. Heather can see the cracks forming. Logan has that permanent “I told y’all this was stupid” expression. The recruits look nervous because, guess what, they should be. Bruce Patterson’s inks keep all that muscle and machinery nice and heavy, while Bob Sharen hits it with those loud old-school Marvel colors that scream superhero book without making the darker moments feel like Saturday morning cereal box nonsense.

The book looks its best once these people finally start moving like they might actually belong on the same damn battlefield. Broderick opens the pages up, lets the powers crash into each other, and gives the fights some room instead of chopping everything into tiny little boxes where nobody knows who punched who. Saint Elmo pops. Snowbird’s transformations got presence. Wolverine fights like Wolverine, close, ugly and personal. Everybody gets their own flavor, which is important because there are a lot of moving parts in this issue and it would’ve been easy for half the cast to disappear into the wallpaper. Janice Chiang has a whole damn job on her hands too, because this script is PEAK early-’90s Marvel. Narration everywhere, tactical talk, character beef, exposition, people explaining what the weapon does while the weapon is probably already going off. It gets thick, papo. Real thick. But the lettering keeps it from turning into alphabet soup, and I never felt like I needed a map just to make it through the page.

And yeah, that density is also the book’s biggest weakness. Lobdell and Furman want to explain the team, establish Department H, build Hudson and Heather, give everybody a personality, introduce the villains, launch the mission and close the loop on why this “first flight” is mostly forgotten. That is a lot of luggage for one special. A few scenes feel like the dialogue is carrying information because there simply was not enough page count to let every relationship breathe naturally. This is very much a comic from its era. People tell you what they are feeling while also telling you what is happening while somebody nearby is probably explaining the weapon. But the energy is there, and the emotional beats land often enough that I can forgive some of the verbal traffic.

What makes Alpha Flight Special #1 hit harder on the rewind is seeing just how damn shaky this whole thing was before Alpha Flight became ALPHA FLIGHT. This ain’t some clean little origin where everybody shakes hands, finds their role and walks off looking heroic. Nah. People got left behind. People walked. People failed. Hudson’s dream had to eat some punches before it ever became the team we know, and that gives the history some real bruises instead of making it feel like polished Marvel trivia.

That’s why this book works for me. Lobdell and Furman are basically showing us the rough draft before anybody cleaned up the margins, and Broderick makes that rough draft look like it could punch through a wall. Then you throw Wolverine into the mix before the whole identity of Alpha Flight has settled, and now you got that extra little bit of chaos seasoning everything. Is the book wordy? Hell yeah. This is early-’90s Marvel, fam, everybody got something to say and apparently nobody owns an inside voice. But there’s heart under all that dialogue and shoulder-padding.

WEPAAAA! This first flight was messy, loud and probably held together with Canadian duct tape, but that’s exactly why it’s worth revisiting.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4/5

Writers: Scott Lobdell & Simon Furman
Pencils: Pat Broderick
Inks: Bruce Patterson
Lettering: Janice Chiang
Colors: Bob Sharen
Editor: Rob Tokar
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Cover Date: June 1992