One of my favorite times in comic books revolved around Alpha Flight. After the excellent Imperial Guard battle/team-up, the X-Men returned to Earth and were almost immediately attacked by Weapon Alpha. This was a great issue because it showed the X-Men in their downtime (as short as it was) and I liked the little touches of personality the story gave the characters, especially Wolverine.

Weapon Alpha puts a hurting on Wolverine, but eventually has to make a strategic retreat when the rest of the X-Men show up. He vows to return and bring the rest of Alpha Flight with him. I was instantly intrigued, but Alpha Flight left my mind as the X-Men immediately went on a string of excellent adventures including a trip to The Savage Land.

On the way back from The Savage Land, they had a layover in Canada when Alpha Flight struck. This is one of my favorite individual issues and one of the best debuts of all time. The cover was beautiful and foreboding at the same time. You could tell this was from the era where covers were used to sell the comic books.

Unfortunately, the second part of the story has been on my wishlist for the past 30 or so years. I have only read it once. I remember liking it, but I couldn’t tell you what happened in it.

How cool is the image of Storm vs Snowbird? A woman who was once believed to be a goddess vs an actual goddess. Of course, we didn’t find that out about Snowbird for a long time.

A few years later, there was a peace between the two teams and Marvel looked like they were going to push the team in a big way. In a really cool move, they split the team one month and had half of the team guest star with the X-Men to take on The Wendigo…

… while the other half of the team made an appearance in Machine Man.

I thought it was great. Shortly after that, Alpha Flight got their own title, which was great while John Byrne was writing and drawing it. I sort of fell out of love with them around that time, but when I think back to those early days, I smile.