Get to Know Canada's Premier Super Hero Squad

Visit your local comic shop now to catch a whole gaggle of great writers and artists who got together to craft ALPHA FLIGHT: TRUE NORTH!

Celebrating the long history of the Great White North's number one hero team, the one-shot comes from the minds of captivating Canadian creators Ed Brisson, Jim Zub, Jed MacKay, Scott Hepburn, Djibril Morissette-Phan, Max Dunbar, Jim Charlampidis, and Ian Herring!

Since it's 1979 debut, Alpha Flight has gone through a number of iterations, ranging from government-sponsored squad to the last line of defense against space-based threats.

Originally debuting in UNCANNY X-MEN (1963) #120—by Chris Claremont and John Byrne—the team's first on-page mission revolved around capturing Wolverine. The Prime Minister recognized him as Weapon X, a one-time member of Alpha Flight under James Hudson's leadership, and wanted him back!

Hudson, otherwise known as Vindicator—though he later took on the name Guardian—put out the call to his teammates the super-speedsters Northstar and Aurora, the hulking Sasquatch, the shape-changer Snow-Bird, and Shaman, the mystic. The team immediately began working on a plan to bring their quarry to them, even if that meant bringing along the X-Men as well!

On a flight back from a recent adventure in Japan, the X-Men found their plane guided towards Calgary thanks to a storm of unnatural origins. Vindicator met them on the runway and called Wolverine out. Instead of letting his teammate rumble, Cyclops ordered the pilots to take off again. When they tried, they instead found themselves crash landing thanks to the furry fury of Sasquatch!

With their jet in ruins, the team made it to the terminal under cover of a blizzard whipped up by Storm. Once inside, Wolverine explained that Hudson recruited him to Alpha Flight, but he quit before any of the current members signed on. To take them on, the X-Men split up.

After Nightcrawler fell to the brother-sister duo of Northstar and Aurora, Vindicator tracked Banshee and Storm to a mall, but he failed to take them out. Meanwhile, Sasquatch got the drop on Logan while Banshee and Storm told Cyclops about their run-in with Vindicator. With that, the fearless leader dedicated his squad to finding their missing teammates.

That carried over into issue #121 wherein Cyclops, Storm, and Colossus broke into the Calgary Stampede fair grounds to get Nightcrawler and Wolverine back. Alpha Flight was waiting for them though and made their own preparations. After making their presence known, Vindicator offered for the mutants to take Nightcrawler and go home safely.

When the inevitable scuffle broke out between the two teams, Wolverine and Nightcrawler revealed that they'd been faking their unconscious state and entered the fray. As the two groups fought, Vindicator and Wolverine argued about their shared past with Logan saying he never wanted in and James telling him that it was he and Heather who helped calm his rage.

The blizzard Shaman summoned eventually grew too strong and Storm managed to quell it. But for her efforts, she got clocked by Northstar who would have lost some teeth to Cyclops if Wolverine hadn't stopped him. Instead of continuing the fisticuffs, Logan agreed to go with Alpha Flight which allowed the X-Men to get home safely. Though he allowed himself to be loaded onto a truck, he managed to escape and hitched a ride back home with his friends!

Wolverine would return to Canada to deal with Alpha Flight and the others in UNCANNY X-MEN (1963) #139-140. The team eventually scored their own ongoing in 1983, with Byrne writing and drawing the team he co-created—that series ran until ish #130 in 1994. Since then, the team has grown and expanded, evolved, and been completely rejuvenated.

Read ALPHA FLIGHT: TRUE NORTH #1 at your local comic shop now!