From the X-Men Companion II (Fantagraphics Books, Inc. 1982)...

More on AF...

SANDERSON: When Vindicator first appears in #109, he appears to have a very different personality than in his later appearances. He seems much nastier toward Wolverine.

BYRNE: Oh, that was just the way Chris wrote it. I never much had any concept of how he was talking or what he was thinking durning that confrontation sequence, except that they were fighting, which meant he wasn't too friendly.

SANDERSON: So at that point you hadn't worked out all the relationship that he and Wolverine had had in the past?

BYRNE: No, most of that came from Chris and I simply accepted it. None of it was too far beyond anything I considered right for the character.

SANDERSON: So Chris came up with the business of Hudson and his wife having found Wolverine and brought him to live with them and put him into Alpha Flight...

BYRNE: All of that came from Chris. All I gave Chris in that first issue was reference to Heather. Chris at one point suggested that Heather was Vindicator's sister, and I said, "No, Heather is his wife and always has been."

It was Chris who came up with the name Alpha Flight. My name for the group, back when they (or some of them, anyway) were fan characters, was the Canadian Shield. This was not a reference to SHIELD, in the Marvel Universe, but to the arc of mountains that curve around Hudson's Bay. (Hudson's Bay also gave Guardian his real name.)

Obviously, we couldn't use "the Canadian Shield" for the group in X-MEN, so after I gave up trying to come up with something better, Chris used "Alpha Flight", which I have never much cared for.

Guardian went thru something similar. I was told I could not use my original name for him because of the Guardians of the Galaxy. So Chris started calling him "Major Maple Leaf" and I was desperately afraid that would stick. I tried to come up with something else, but nothing worked. It was Chris who dubbed him "Vindicator", naming him after a WW2 fighter plane. When I asked what Canada had to "vindicate" there was no answer. Thus we got the first of many names that had nothing to do with what the character was all about.

By the time Alpha got their own book, I was able to argue in favor of restoring "Guardian", tho many still call the character "Vindicator", unaware of this "behind the scenes" stuff.

*ducks out of the way*

Edited by Ryan Maxwell on 08 July 2010 at 2:09pm

There was a line change, I think, in either the Classic X-Men version of UXM 109 or in the UXM 109 pages exerpted in AF #17, where instead of saying "You were there when I sliced Chasin's [sic] tie" Wolverine says "I cut my ties...and Chasen's."  I loved that line change.

I only have the original for reference.  Does anyone know where the line change takes place?  And if it's just in my head, let me down gently.