Look... up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... my interest in this new Alpha Flight series, shooting away at record speed. The creative team has a serious problem here. After all, if they can't hook a Canadian super-hero comic reader such as myself on Canadian super-heroes, they're in trouble. To be fair, the weakness in this issue has nothing to do with the Canadian characters who serve as the title's protagonists. No, it's the lengthy background Lobdell writes here that ultimately fails to inform the reader of the exposition they really need to know in order to follow along. The lightness of Clayton Henry's art fails to capture the intensity and ugliness of the villainous aliens at the heart of this issue as well.
Sasquatch sits his new Alpha Flight roster down to explain what happened to the original Canadian super-hero team. But first, in order to understand, the new heroes need a history lesson... and intergalactic history lesson. Sasaquatch tells them of an alien race called the Plodex -- a race dedicated to the arts of war, violence, carnage and subjugation. He tells them of how the Plodex's desire for conquest extended beyond their reach, and how their use of biotechnology broadened their empire... and destroyed it. The Plodex may be long gone, but a couple of Plodex eggs and accompanying technology eventually found their to Earth.
This is a story of war and cruelty, of intensity and ambition. Henry's cartoony style suits the overall comedic tone of this series, but he fails to capture the horror that it the Plodex race. I remember the Plodex from the early John Byrne issues of the original Alpha Flight series, and one of the things that was impressive about his alien creation was just how alien they seemed. The Plodex here seem just like a bunch of hulking humanoids, and they lack the creepy, unnatural look of the originals. Henry also fails to convey any sense of immensity in the Plodex ships.
Lobdell spends an entire issue running down the Plodex history. Well, I guess it's clear that the threat that took out the original Alpha Flight is Plodex in origin, but I really don't see what this level of detail in the backstory accomplishes. Lobdell could have provided just as much required information in a couple of pages as opposed to 22 or so. The main characters are barely glimpsed here and play no part in the story in this issue.
What's most frustrating about it all, though, is that Lobdell omits the most important pieces of information. Of how a Plodex creature came to be a founding member of Alpha Flight. Lobdell doesn't even name Marrina, though she is shown in the art. The writer mentions nothing of Alpha Flight's prior encounters with Plodex threats. I can't believe he used up all that space and ended up wasting it by leaving out the most important bits of exposition.
