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Nope. Never heard of 'em.

Puck was created in the most prosaic of ways. When ALPHA FLIGHT got their own title, Jim Shooter suggested I create some new team members, so that I could lay claim to the creator's percentage of the royalties that had been introduced since I created the original team. I kicked around various "Canadianisms" looking for inspriration, thinking about the identifying elements of the cities and provinces, and the like. I also made up a list of random words connected in most Americans' minds with Canada. One of those was "puck", and the rest, as they say, is history.

(There is the barest, slenderest, most vanishingly small whisper of a chance that a portion of inspiration might have come from "Major Domo", a character from the old Canadian Whites*. He was a dwarf who sat upon the shoulders of a big guy who had lost both his arms. No, really.)

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* Black and white comics published during WW2, when there was an embargo on foreign publications, including comics.

Thank you so much for the quick reply.  This was a question I had been meaning to ask you for years (literally!) but never had the chance to meet you at a convention.  Despite being a Byrne Victim since WAY back.  And By the way, never ask Chris Claremont a John Bryne question in person.  Lets just say his entire body language changes.  My son was praising Chris at a convention and I had to throw in how the writing on X-Men always seemed better to me when it was credited as Co-Plotted by John Bryne and asked about the collaboration process.....lets just say he wasn't very forthcoming and wasn't interested in me any longer!

Still I recommend checking out one of the Mongo Mysteries and try, just try, not to picture Puck in your head as you read!  The Mongo character even talked about the constant pain of being a dwarf, something you made note of in Puck's solo adventure in early AF!

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Before I started writing Puck, I read up on achondroplastic dwarfism, to be sure I described the condition correctly. (Actually, I didn't know the name of the condition, and worked backwards until I found it -- at the LIBRARY!)

No doubt the author of the "Mongo Mysteries" did the same.

Unfortunately, Bill Mantlo, when subsequently handling the character, looked no further than the pages of ALPHA FLIGHT for his background research, and so came up with his own "explanation" for various elements I had ascribed to Puck's condition.

Truth to tell, the affair of the Bronze Bishop was intended to be Puck's "Giant Rat of Sumatra" -- a tale that would never be told!