Did JB give Bill Mantlo any guides or suggestions for his ALPHA FLIGHT run?
JB: I gave Bill no tips nor insights on ALPHA — because he said he didn’t want any! He told me he had got himself a complete set of the series, and sat down and literally torn them apart, pasting pages and panels into a notebook so he would have a handy reference for each of the characters and subplots I’d developed. Of course, he then went on to do the “origin” of Puck, with the whole “demon inside” thing being based, apparently, on the single reference Puck had made to being in constant pain, something which Bill failed to grasp was an effect of the condition — achondroplasty, called by name in the same issue that referenced the pain — which caused Puck’s dwarfism. (This was a manifestation of something I used to call “Claremont-itis”, before it came to infect almost everybody — that manner of backstorying characters in such a way that absolutely no one, nowhere, is ever “normal”.
JB: I gave Bill no tips nor insights on ALPHA — because he said he didn’t want any! He told me he had got himself a complete set of the series, and sat down and literally torn them apart, pasting pages and panels into a notebook so he would have a handy reference for each of the characters and subplots I’d developed. Of course, he then went on to do the “origin” of Puck, with the whole “demon inside” thing being based, apparently, on the single reference Puck had made to being in constant pain, something which Bill failed to grasp was an effect of the condition — achondroplasty, called by name in the same issue that referenced the pain — which caused Puck’s dwarfism. (This was a manifestation of something I used to call “Claremont-itis”, before it came to infect almost everybody — that manner of backstorying characters in such a way that absolutely no one, nowhere, is ever “normal”.
