Originally Posted by
Alpha Rider
"Okay, I told you before the Canadian setting wasn't why I bought it. To be honest, though, the location did factor in for me - but it had more to do with the fact that it wasn't set in the USA.
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...But like said before they've treated this book with an "Isolation" factor. They never were involved in anything big with the other charaters, and the lack of "Big Time" villans were not even there.
The Mantlo era is still a sore point with me, but one thing that happened was Alpha Flight was tied more closely to the Marvel Universe in the first year: fought the Hulk (AF# 29), appearance of The X-Men (#33) and Wolverine with the 1st appearance of Lady Deathstrike (#s 33 & 34), the astral form of Dr. Strange (# 36), fighting alongside The Avengers (# 39), and guest-starring The Sub-Mariner for most of the year. Attuma may not have been the biggest bad guy, but he sure was a pain-in-the-neck.
"To the best of my knowledge, yes. I believe the story I heard was, Mantlo wanted to write his own original team; he wasn't given the chance, so when he got a team book, he replaced them with his own creations. And as soon as somebody else took over, they started bringing back the originals."
That's a good point. I never thought of that, but how much control did he have on the book? I was always under the impresion that he just wrote the charaters from what Byrne left behind and wrote them til they were no more notes to go on. But I understand that people like the original charaters, but why is evryone so afraid of change? Don't you get tired of reading the same charaters on the same team, over and over, and over again? These are some of the reasons I stopped reading X-Men and Avengers. It got so boaring. at least with AF they had new charaters to learn about. Sure I missed the originals, but I kind of moved on.