Originally Posted by
King Mungi
Actually, strictly speaking, it was the Plodex copy of him. Would that copy have a reason to lie over such a minor thing? No, I can't think of one. Could he get it wrong? Yes, in theory. Ever seen the original Star Trek "What are little girls made of?". Someone copies Kirk, but he has enough will power to place a clue, a response which is atypical of the real Kirk and will alert others to this being a fake.
Earlier Handbooks confirmed what I think John Byrne explained in interviews but never got round to saying in the actual pages of the comics, which is that Puck chose his name after the character in Shakespeare's play. Normally a statement in the pages of the comic would overrule the Handbook (and the original creator's intentions), but it's coming from a potentially unreliable source. I'll admit, when I was writing Puck, I missed that, because I wasn't paying attention to what the ersatz Puck said (I had a couple hundred issues to go through for Puck, and by the end I wasn't paying as tight attention to those around him, because the profile was about Puck, not them).
So, we've got definitive statement in earlier Handbooks based on creator's intentions contradicted by definitive statement from an unreliable source. I'm not going to just dismiss the evidence which suggests I got it wrong, because that would be biased of me, ignoring the bits which don't support "my side" of the debate. But equally, if Alpha Flight vol.1 had confirmed the Shakespeare connection, no one would argue that vol.3 simply got it wrong, and Handbooks are also canonical sources (Gruenwald used them to add in backstory the comics provided by the writers that the regular titles hadn't had space to include, and in that respect they are the same as if the writer had introduced the info in a text story). Plus, it didn't come from the real Puck which does allow for a level of doubt. So what we have here is two conflicting canonical sources. In hindsight, if I had noticed the ersatz Puck's comment, I would simply have left out the comment about where Puck got his name, because rather than confirming the origin of his codename, Plodex Puck's statement has left introduced a level of doubt. We are no longer sure which version is accurate.