Featuring the following heroine!

Guardian
by Adam Bourret

Real name: Heather McNeill Hudson
AKA: Vindicator. She's done several flip-flops between the two code names.

First appearance: Uncanny X-Men 139

Favorite quote: "The bottom line is there are lives at stake, Russian, Canadian, it doesn't matter." (Alpha Flight 109)

Team affiliation: Heather started out as a mere secretary for Jerome Jaxon at Am-Can Petroleum Company. When James Macdonald Hudson left the company for Department H (Canada's answer to the CIA or KGB), Heather left as well. She worked as the secretary of Alpha Flight for a while until the death of her husband. After first leading the team in her civilian identity, Heather donned Mac's electromagnetic battlesuit. She has been Alpha Flight's leader ever since. When Alpha Flight disbanded, Heather resumed her life with her reincarnated husband. While her de-aged hubby is Alpha Flight's leader, Heater remains the brains behind the team.
Powers: Heather is a human with no personal superpowers of her own. She has, however, worn an EM (electro-magnetic) suit under her costume that was linked to her brainwaves. The suit permitted her to fly with a force field around herself and also to discharge both plasma energy blasts and bursts of sonic energy. Her current suit draws power from geo-thermal rather than electro-magnetic sources.

Favorite story line: "No Future" parts one through three (Alpha Flight 130). While Alpha Flight's final story line was rather cliche, Heather was the star of the show. Writer Simon Furman finally showed us how far she had come and showed Heather as a strong, proud, powerful and fiercely intelligent woman hell bent on the saving of lives.








Least favorite story line: The long-running subplot that Mac had kidnapped Wolverine and given him the adamantium skeleton against Wolvie's will, then lured the escaped mutant back to Department H by marrying Heather and using her as attractive bait. Thankfully this plot has been dismissed as mere paranoia on Heather's part. Neither I nor any other Alpha reader I have spoken to has ever figured out what exactly the point was.