Alpha Flight #37, AUG 86 (writer) Bill Mantlo (artist) David Ross
This was a neat little package, though tied up poorly for a single issue. I know I can’t expect miracles, but this comes close.
We’re confronted this issue following the journals of Captain F.R. Crozier, chief science officer of a doomed expedition to finding the Northwest Passage. Ships are stuck, sailors are starving, and this sentence has a lot of the letter ‘S.’ They’re taking a 600 mile trek across the Arctic. Things are looking bleak, so Crozier takes himself a powder; however, it is specially concocted to slow his bodily functions to where he would need neither food or drink. His plan is to “die” in the ice as his shipmates continue without him. Unluckily for him, they give him a proper burial.
Years pass, and Snowbird is pregnant. Shaman is going to deliver the baby at a special place of power to do what regular science could not. Turns out he isn’t going to be able to, either, because his daughter Talisman wants today to be hers for revenge. She’s longed to humble her father for killing her mother and losing her own humanity. Oh, the humanity!
Things aren’t looking good, with or without Talisman. You got to research people. If there’s a dead guy buried under your place of power, it’s probably not the best place to be birthing a child from a demi-goddess. Talisman won’t help her father (who has inadvertently summoned Crozier) and she wants to step in and save the baby herself. The only problem: Crozier isn’t dead!
All these maggots and rust and other forms of decay attack Alpha Flight as they do the bidding of Captain Crozier. It also turns out that Talisman cannot control Crozier because he’s not yet a spirit. Bad juju, indeed.
Our issue ends (almost) as a tear is forming in Shaman’s eye, calling out for help having been made old and feeble by Crozier. That LAST page focuses on Atlantis and maybe some foreshadowing of things to come.