Modern Masters vol. 7 : John Byrne

I don't know if this has been posted or if anybody here at the forum has had the chance to read or buy this book. Jon B. Cooke & Eric Nolen-Weathington did an interview with Byrne and, I thought I'd share a little bit of the interview about Alpha Flight...

JBC: Did it feel good to be doing a Canadian super-hero team?

JOHN: Well, yeah. It was one of those.... It was actually Dave's (Cockrum) idea, when he was doing the book (X-Men). He figured that the Canadian goverment spent all this money developing Wolverine, and they probably weren't too thrilled that he'd gone off and joined this ostensibly international but really American group. So they'd probably send somebody after him. And that was where the first Guardian---or Vindicator, as Chris (Claremont) called him. I went around saying, "Vindicator? Because Canada has to vindicate what?" [laughter] "Vindicator's a good name for a German super-hero, okay?"

So that story started with Dave, and then it developed into Alpha Flight. And Alpha Flight were mostly characters I'd come up with in my fan days. In fact, one of the first jobs I didn't get was that Captain America was going to visit Canada, and Steve Englehart, who was writing Captain America at the time, thought it would be a good idea to get a Canadian artist to illustrate it. They got in touch with me through this John Mansfield guy and asked me if I would like to do an issue of Captain America, would I send in some samples? So I drew some really bad samples and what Steve said was, "We've decided not to do the story". Which I thought was a nice way to crush me. But it was going to be Captain America fighting a Canadian super-hero, so I drew Guardian, who was my Canadian guy that I had---

JBC: Cap was the American flag....

JOHN: You got it. I had come up with him when I was going to have my own Canadian comic book company that I had all worked out since I was 22. So that was where Guardian came from. Alpha Flight grew out of that. I think Shaman---who was originally called Chinook---was the only one I had created right there on the page in X-Men. The others all pre-existed.

MM :-s