Vengeance Alpha
Alpha Flight join in with Marvel's Acts of Vengeance as Heather McNeil and Diamond Lil battle Nekra and the Scorpion in James D. Hudnall and John Calimee's Outsiders.
The only Alpha Flight I've read is John Byrne's seminal work on the title's debut (and 2 or 3 issues of Mantlo's run that wrapped up Byrne's run), so most of the issue was spent with me asking myself what the hell is going on. Who the hell is the Sorcerer? Why are Alpha Flight considered outlaws by the government? Why does Heather claim nobody would date her in college? Other than being lost on a lot of the references to Alpha history since 1986, the rest of the story is fairly straight forward with Heather and Lil (the two best Alphans) going off to fight villains by themselves.
Really, there's not much else to it. Heather fighting Nekra and Lil fighting Scorpion are interesting enough match-ups and next issue apparently Asp and Owl will join the mix, but in this issue we don't really get much besides set-up, references to continuity I don't know of and maybe 4 or 5 pages of actual fights. Plus, Scorpion out of his costume kicking Lil's ass? Please. I had a hard time buying that.
This issue was mostly a "wow, a lot has changed" for me, but I do like that my two favorite Alpha Flight members were given most the stuff to do this issue. There looks to be some interesting stuff going on in Alpha Flight a good 40 or so issues after the last issue I've read and it's actually really refreshing to see Alpha Flight take part in a crossover event since they rarely ever get the chance. In fact, other than this, I think the only other crossover they tied into was Secret Wars II. As a whole, despite boasting my two favorite characters of the series, this issue disappointingly turned out to be perfectly ordinary otherwise.
