UNCANNY X-MEN #121: Shoot-Out at the Stampede!

All Alpha Flight wanted was their Wolverine back. He really ties the team together.

Originally Published May 1979

Alpha Flight - the squad of Loudly Canadian Superheroes led by Wolverine's old running buddy Vindicator - has absconded with Wolverine and Nightcrawler during the X-Men's forced layover in Calgary. Cyclops, Colossus and Storm track them to, of course, the grounds of the famous Calgary Stampede, which is closed for the season.

Where's Puck? What is Alpha Flight without Puck?

With their compatriots tied up out in the open, the X-Men consider whether this could be a trap, but if it is, it's a pretty obvious one, which is the opposite of how traps work, and indeed it's not that - the Flight comes right out and says they have no quarrel with the X-Men, and if they will relinquish Claws McGee, they get safe passage back to the States.

Cyclops, who in Vindicator has encountered the only bigger, wetter blanket than himself in the world, declares that Mister, if you've got a quarrel with Wolverine, you've got a quarrel with all of us.

While they talk, Colossus suspects Northstar (the fast-moving white-haired guy... like Quicksilver, but French-Canadian) of moving in to attack Cyclops, and acts rashly. And so, it comes to fisticuffs.

Which seems like it would be a bad 6-on-3 fight, except Wolverine and Nightcrawler were only playing possum, enabling them to even the numbers. So, yay.

We get displays of all the powers of the various members of Alpha Flight. Sasquatch, giant and hairy as his namesake implies, dukes it out with Colossus. Northstar dodges Cyclops' optic blasts while Nightcrawler chases 'Star's sister Aurora, who takes to the air, eventually planting a kiss on her when he catches up, in the highest-stakes game of sardines I've ever seen.

TBH this is not a good look to modern eyes.

Meanwhile, Snowbird, whose power unsurprisingly allows her to turn into a snow owl (and not, simply a huge Anne Murray fan, or a resident of Florida during the winter months) and chases Storm around in the sky while she tries to fend off the magic blizzard Shaman has whipped up.

I still don't really approve of the Shaman character, especially when he animates some wooden totems to battle Cyclops. Again, those are real religious figures held sacred to many.

Storm is the MVP, using her cape to capture and trap Snowbird, then pushing her abilities to the brink to abate the storm, which is raging beyond Shaman's control. For her trouble, she gets knocked out with a rabbit punch from Northstar. As the X-Men prepare for round two, Wolverine calls a halt -- which he says he would have done earlier, except he loves a good scrap.

See, he doesn't want any trouble on his account, so he's going to do the Cool Loner Thing To Do and let Alpha Flight take him so that his teammates can go. Over Cyclops' protests, the Canadians load Wolverine up into their specially-clawproofed paddy wagon for transportation to a proper holding facility.

Aw man, Frickin' Garson's here.

And that's that.

Only it's not, of course - in the air, once free of their Canadian escorts, Cyclops begins crowdsourcing ideas for how to barge back into Canada and steal Wolverine back. It's not that easy - have you ever seen Border Security??

Just as Cyclops is getting ready to turn the plane around, Wolverine tells him not to bother.

Wait, Wolverine tells -- ??!

That's right, Logan has been sitting in the cockpit this entire time, chatting with the pretty lady flying the plane. Turns out he was able to give his captors the slip, somewhere between pages. Such a cool loner. I want him on my lunchbox.

When asked what happens the next time Alpha Flight comes after him, Wolverine gives a hearty "Whatever, brah" and pops a beer in celebration. The.... end?

The Wolverine abides.

Further Thoughts:

While all this is going on, Banshee is quite literally locked out of the fight by one of Shaman's mystical powers, an invisible barrier surrounding the Stampede. He is still technically a normie, having lost his sonic scream defeating Moses Magnum.

Byrne has said the main purpose of Alpha Flight was to create a team that could fight the X-Men - they weren't really meant to be fully-developed characters. And on that level, they work. They certainly all have powers that can be featured fighting the X-Men. However, all their vaunted teamwork basically adds up to "One AF member squares off against one equivalent X-Man and hope we have the home turf advantage." That said, there does feel like enough depththere that it's not hard to see how they resonated with people to the point where there would be interest in a spinoff. Much like the Imperial Guard, they all seem to have something going on, and are the heroes of their own story. They have the bonus advantage of making Canada seem cool and mildly threatening, and teaching American Youngsters about their neighbours to the north.

That said, I still have a bone to pick with Shaman, Snowbird, and even to some degree Sasquatch. They embody a trope named by Thomas King as the "Dead Indian" in his work on the state of the Indigenous Person in Western Culture, The Inconvenient Indian - a white person's tidy concept of what a Native person should be, (all sacred magicks and tribal wisdom) - evrn if it's meant to be affectionate - while ignoring the complex realities of the living group of people being represented. You should read that book to find out more. This would be Thomas King, the American-Canadian Indigenous novelist and cultural commentator, not Tom King, the guy who writes Batman and once used a slur for Native Americans in his comic to try to emphasize the humanity and plight of his robot characters.

An Indigenous person did not write this, I'm saying.

Sorry, back to comics. The issue is kind of a shaggy dog story, as we get the fight, and it's fine, and the Alpha Flight characters get, but don't steal, the spotlight with their wacky Canucky powers. And then it ends, and the X-Men lose Wolverine, except they don't because of off-page badassness. This is technically what's known as a cop-out, but we're meant to be impressed by the use-your-imagination deployment of Wolverine's badass capabilities. This is when Wolverine really starts to be built into a pet character for the creators, and not the occasional chowderhead who starts fights he can't finish and gets clobbered into orbit for his trouble.

Since this comic was published, John Byrne has gotten older but his girlfriends have stayed the same age.