Friday Night Fights: Into the boards

It's a free-for-all on the ice in this week's installment of Friday Night Fights, as Tamsin Mary Cates, Canadian teenager and interdimensional traveller, schools a member of Chinese vampire hockey team about how the game is really played...

(from Skeleton Key, Vol. 2: The Celestial Calendar by Andi Watson)
Skeleton Key also has the distinction of being Maura's favorite comic series ever, and while nothing will ever surpass my affections for Date With Debbi, I have to concur that Andi Watson's gorgeously illustrated mix of whimsical fantasy and often painful reality is a stellar example of comics at their very best.

The Rude Kids - The Hockey Game (from The Worst of The Rude Kids: A Pardonless Collection, 1998) - Here's a thematically appropriate slice of classic Swedish punk to round things out.

Friday Night Fights: It's a beauty, eh?

Just so we're all clear on this: Snowbird, the half-human daughter of the goddess Nelvanna...

(from Alpha Flight v1 #24, July 1985; by Byrne and Wiacek)
...has zero patience for smartassess who indulge in semantic games. Thank goodness (or maybe not) that the comics internet hadn't yet come into being.

While there are many (too many, actually) comics I loved in my formative years that my present-day self can't bear to reread -- even at gunpoint -- my affection for John Byrne's 28-issue run Alpha Flight, a team book featuring Canadian superheroes, has remained steady over the past couple decades. There's a fascinating oddness to the stories, stemming from the freedom Byrne had in working with his own creations in a setting that was certainly tied to the rest of the Marvel Universe, yet also came across as its own little world, with a greater sense of authenticity than the then-standard practice of adding some exaggerated local color onto a stock locale as window dressing.

The question of how authentic it was is another matter, best left to our Canadian friends, but it did shape my impressions of our neighbors to the north...

...and what I didn't learn from Alpha Flight, I picked up from these guys...

Bob and Doug McKenzie - Take Off (from The Great White North, 1982) - Featuring the talents of Mr. Geddy Lee.

(Bahlactus always tells it as it is.)