Issue: Vol. 28, No. 1 Issued: Spring 2003, Limited Edition
(inside front cover)
This issue should not exist.
Not because it was difficult to assemble—though it was—but because there are no incentives left for doing this kind of work. There is no advertising market for retrospection. There is no distribution network that rewards historical honesty. There is no institutional appetite for asking what was lost, rather than what must now be endured.
Which is why this issue exists anyway.
We were not interested in rumor, conspiracy, or speculation. Those are abundant. We were interested in memory. In how quickly consensus forms, and how quickly it collapses. In the strange, unsettling fact that the most important era of modern heroism ended less than three years ago, and already feels as if it belongs to a different civilization.
This magazine ran for twenty-seven years before we went dark. We believed then—as we do now—that pop culture is not a distraction from history, but one of the ways history tells the truth about itself. Alpha Force was not just a military asset or a strategic anomaly. They were a cultural fact. They changed how people dressed, spoke, argued, trusted, and slept.
If we cannot talk honestly about that, then the silence has already won.
— Editor-in-Chief
By the late 1990s, it had become possible to forget that superheroes were ever controversial.
That hadn’t always been the case. When Alpha Force first emerged from the wreckage of the Cold War and the long, grinding war with the Omega League, they were met with suspicion by governments and fascination by the public. Power, after all, is unsettling when it does not belong to the state. But over time, something shifted. Alpha Force did not merely win battles; they professionalized heroism. They appeared on schedules. They coordinated with international authorities. They explained themselves clearly and, just as importantly, they rarely contradicted one another in public. The chaos that once followed metahuman intervention receded, replaced by a sense—quiet, unspoken, but widely shared—that the worst excesses of the superhuman age were behind us.
Alpha Force did not feel like an exception to the world’s rules. They felt like the world finally learning how to manage its outliers.
By the time the Omega League was dismantled in 1999, Alpha Force had stopped being radical. They were institutional. They appeared in classrooms and disaster-preparedness materials. They were cited in foreign policy journals. TIME’s now-infamous year-end issue naming them “The Unstoppable Protectors” felt less like praise than documentation. It recorded a consensus that had already settled in.
This was what competence looked like.
They were not idols. They were infrastructure.
It is difficult, now, to convey how reassuring that felt.
When the first k’tharen attacks struck on January 1, 2001, the reaction was not disbelief so much as grim recognition. Humanity had faced existential threats before. Alpha Force had been built for exactly this kind of moment. The language of war returned quickly, but so did a deeper assumption: this would be brutal, costly, and survivable.
The war that followed unfolded in public view. From winter through summer, cities burned and evacuations became routine. Airspace was contested. Entire regions lived on edge for months at a time. Alpha Force fought continuously, visibly, and without rotation. Three of its members died during that campaign—one after another, over the course of the year. Each death was acknowledged. Each absence lingered. No replacements were announced. No attempt was made to soften the reality that the team was shrinking under sustained pressure.
That detail matters, because it shaped how the victory felt.
By early September, the k’tharen were not merely repelled but beaten. They were driven offworld through sustained combat and coordinated strategy. Whatever history ultimately makes of that campaign, it is important to say plainly that this outcome was not symbolic or accidental. It was earned, over nine months of fighting, at extraordinary cost. The relief that followed was not naïve; it was exhausted.
The gathering in Manhattan was not a triumphal parade. It was formal, restrained, and heavy with closure. Five members of Alpha Force stood before cameras and dignitaries, accepting gratitude that felt earned and final. There was no sense that history was about to pivot. If anything, the prevailing mood suggested that the most dangerous chapter of the modern world had just closed.
What followed did not feel like the next phase of the war.
It felt like a violation of its rules.
The betrayal on Alpha Night did not resemble escalation. It was abrupt, clinical, and deeply disorienting. The attack lasted less than a minute. There was no exchange, no warning, no opportunity for adaptation or resistance. Alpha Force did not fall in battle. They were removed.
What followed was not panic so much as disorientation.
In the years since, debate has flourished. Analysts argue about whether Alpha Force had become too centralized, too visible, too symbolic. Critics suggest that their very success created blind spots that were inevitably exploited. Others insist that no amount of caution could have prepared humanity for a betrayal of that scale. These arguments are not without merit, but they miss a more uncomfortable truth.
Alpha Force did not fail because they were naïve. They failed because they were good at what they did.
They solved the problems they were built to solve. They reduced chaos, standardized response, and made superhuman intervention legible to the rest of us. In doing so, they gave the world something it had never possessed before: a benchmark. A sense of what excellence looked like when it was practiced openly and held accountable.
When Alpha Force was destroyed, that benchmark vanished with them.
The survivors of the post–Alpha Night world are not living in the shadow of superheroes. They are living in the absence of comparison. Whatever comes next—whatever improvisations, compromises, or moral contortions the future demands—will be judged against a standard that can no longer defend itself.
That may be the most lasting consequence of Alpha Force’s disappearance. Not that heroes died, but that humanity lost its clearest example of what its best efforts once looked like.
The age of superheroes did not end in fire or ideology. It ended in competence meeting a reality it was never meant to face.
And we are still figuring out what replaces that.