Was NorthStar always intended to be a gay character?
Was it your intent when you created NorthStar that he would be a gay man? JB: When I created Alpha Flight they were basically half a dozen characters who could survive a prolonged battle with the X-Men. They had very little depth — tho I am a compulsive creator of backstory, so I knew something about their histories even then — and were not really created with any thought toward them eventually getting their own title. Unfortunately (?) they proved enormously popular, and so Marvel began pushing me to do an ALPHA FLIGHT book. Eventually I relented, and agreed to do the series — which meant I had one problem instantly: I had to find ways to make those characters more three dimensional. One of the things that popped immediately into my head was to make one of them Gay. I had recently read an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN on what was then (the early 80s) fairly radical new thinking on just what processes caused a person to be homosexual, and the evidence was pointing increasingly to i
