England Swings Like a Pendulum Do.

It's July 1977: Donna Summer is Number One with  the saucy electronica of I Feel Love. Hot Chocolate's slightly queeny reggae-funk So You Win Again is number two and the third spot goes to ELP's prog-tastic Fanfare For the Common Man. At five, it's Brotherhood of Man's Abba-lite Angelo and at number seven, those filthy Sex Pistols and Pretty Vacant. Benny Hill and George and Mildred are big tv hits. The past truly is a different country.
And this comic appeared in the newsagents:

It marked another stage in the steady decline in the fortunes of Marvel's tailor-made British superstar. In true punk style, he's launched himself at Her Maj during her bloody Jubilee Year!

She ain't no human bein'.

Where did it all go wrong?
 Marvel UK had gone from strength to strength in the early 70s, releasing numerous weekly titles, all with the chummy, inclusive voice of Stan Lee, inducting kids from Aberdeen to Aberdare to the Merry Marvel Marching Society. But these titles were all reprints: the company decided it was time to introduce a series that was exclusive to the British market.
Artist Herb Trimpe had reservations about the concept. He suspected that British readers would feel patronised and Marvel's UK editor Neil Tennant (later a Pet Shop Boy) was also dubious, citing the local preference for war and football strips. (Fireball, The Fightin' Full-back of WWII by Tony the Tiger Isabella and Gorgeous George Tuska, declined to comment.)

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That Granny Takes A Trip font for "16 pages in full colour" is sooo Seventies!

The "great new mag" hedged its bets somewhat for the British market: for me as a 13-year-old Scottish Marvelite, the cardboard mask, colour-it-yourself pages and issue two's cardboard boomerang seemed a shade DC Thomson and juvenile for another Marvel Masterwork.
Captain Britain made his debut in October 1976, three months after this character:

UJ was introduced as a  veteran WWI hero who is tragically crippled by his vampire brother, Baron Blood, in this three-part slice of warime gothic hokum.
Re-reading the trade paperback collection of the CB series yesterday, it's a derivative and often slipshod strip. The story opens with the Lion of London in combat with some evil knights. We then have a flashback to a hi-tech assault on the Darkmoor nuclear research facility (Where were UNIT when we needed them?). Young Brian Braddock survives and is granted super-powers by a pair of god-like beings in a stone circle. CB is a blend of acrobat and super-strong brawler with Little John's quarterstaff.

In his civilian guise, Brian smokes a pipe like Reed Richards, but is a University student like Peter Parker and has a mirror-image supporting cast, including the bully Jacko Tanner, (a horrible character) and a John Denver-lookalike called Sandy Ross, his Harry Osborn . His JJJ-analogue is police inspector Dai Thomas, who loosely  resembles John Thaw in The Sweeney and who lost his wife in a New York "superhero donnybrook". Romantic interest comes in the Betty Brant-ish shape of Courtney Ross (Courtney was unheard of as a girls' name in the Seventies). However, we're also introduced to glam blonde  Kate Fraser, who first appeared in G-S Dracula in 1974 and later assisted Blade. Kate has psychometric abilities but they cause her to psychically experience the deaths of murder victims.Kate's powers would have made her an interesting, if morbid, aide for CB. In the next few episodes, we go off-model with Spidey: young Brian was quite the lady-killer until his parents died mysteriously and he has a twin sister Betsy, a pilot, and a racing car-driver brother, Jamie, who quickly discovers his secret. Like all UK Marvel heroes, they live in a stately manor, on ancient, magickal land.
Brian wrestles with the obligatory 70s identity crisis but for a would-be physicist, shows remarkable lack of interest in the functions of his quarterstaff-weapon. However, Claremont employs the same crisp but melodramatic tone of his Iron Fist series (and in fact obliquely references the Feb '76 Ravager story from issue 3 of that series in CB 6). He introduces two villains: "They all called me mad" scientist Albert Potter, the armoured Hurricane and Dr. Synne, a demonic hypnotist  and a reference to The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh-

 Marvel Comics ? Me? With MY reputation?

- who turns out to be the pawn of a mad computer in the basement of Braddock Manor! He also features a hi-tech criminal gang run by the (unseen)Vixen. We have a hint here of a potential arch-villain for CB. But then, Claremont leaves after ten weekly episodes (due to "artistic differences" with the editor, Larry Lieber, Stan's brother). His replacement is Gary Friedrich, who, aside from his creation of Johnny Blaze the Ghost Rider, was a rather pedestrian Marvel scripter.
Any character work and sub-plots go out the window as the series undertakes a multipart thrill-ride teaming CB with Captain America, Nick Fury and  STRIKE, the appositely-named British answer to SHIELD. On the other hand, the team-up and conflict with legendary Lee-Kirby arch-fiend the Red Skull lends CB new legitimacy in the Marvel Universe.
The rise of a new Nazi party in the UK might not have seemed so far-fetched at the time and the storyline features the mock execution of PM Jim Callaghan, who has a statesman-like role in the story rather than the complacency he appeared to show during the real Winter of Discontent.

The dialogue throughout the second half of the collection stretches credulity. It seems hard to believe that posh student Brian would use such loutish terms as "mate" and "Yank" to the Living Legend of WWII. It would be a different story for young people of the modern era, of course, with their conflicted love-hate relationship with the USA.
The first collected edition ends on a cliffhanger but after the Red Skull story, CB enjoyed a magickal storyline with Merlin where he was granted the golden Star Sceptre with its power of flight. However, was the God-War title meant to be a conscious echo of the Cod War with Iceland?

Just like today, the world faced deep recession in 1977. The UK was in financial turmoil, having borrowed money from the IMF with resulting widespread service cuts. Inflation and unemployment began to soar. The disenfranchised Punk movement had a massive impact on pop culture. Mums and dads no longer had money to spend on non-essentials: UK Marvel comics began to consolidate, titles merging together like Spider-Man and Captain Britain.
The series had been very weak for much of its run. Hackneyed monsters and one-dimensional scripting couldn't be saved, even by the pencils of the legendary Big John Buscema. A two-part team-up with Spidey,  by Chris Claremont and his soon-to-be superstar collaborator John Byrne, was a frustrating glimpse of what could have-should have- been.  After almost six months, Brian was replaced, ironically, by Captain America in the Spider-Man comic. Apart from an annual in 1978, he disappeared for a year.

Don't have this. Yet.

 Neil Tennant was probably right. A war strip-maybe Roy Thomas and Frank Robbins' Union Jack - might have been a safer bet; after all, Secret Army, a drama about the Belgian Resistance in WWII began in September 1977 and was a huge hit for the BBC. At the same time that CB's own comic merged with Spidey, Union Jack's son, the Mighty Destroyer, appeared in the Invaders to take on the UJ mantle. Brian Falsworth, interestingly, was retconned as a gay character.
However, Captain Britain returned from obscurity in 1979, first in the home-grown and Tokiensesque Black Knight strip and then, in '81 in his best-known patriotic uniform, drawn by glossy cartoonist Alan Davis. The surreal and slightly satirical  strip suddenly burst into vibrant life with the dark direction initiated by Alan Moore.

 I cannot stress how exciting Alan Moore's plots were for Captain Britain. The Midlands Magus folded in his Special Executive characters from Dr. Who back-up strips of the late 70s, threw in a cameo by the Hellfire Club's Sebastian Shaw and turned Betsy into a purple-haired psionic. The villains were an unstoppable killing machine called the Fury and Jim Jaspers,a reality-warping fascist despot- a mad merger of Galactus and Oswald Mosely. We even get a glimpse of Claremont's crime boss, Vixen: a hedonistic, middle-aged woman, perhaps alluding to a vulpine Margaret Thatcher.
 The brutality and pessimism of the strip's dystopian future had all been seen before in the X-men's seminal and infamous Days of Future Past two-parter but here, in a British context (and especially with the slaughter of UK comics icons Kelly's Eye, General Jumbo, the Steel Claw and Dolmann) it was daring and startling and a landmark period for Marvel UK. Crucially, it served as the spearhead of the British Invasion of DC comics.

 Captain Britain's own b/w British comics magazine launched in January 1985 with Abslom Daak the Dalek Killer as a back-up strip. It introduced a number of striking new characters and changed the freakish supporting character Meggan into a glorious, faerie-like being.When that title folded in February 1986, Claremont incorporated Brian and Meggan into his mutant continuity, through the X-men and New Mutants annuals in '87 and then in the ongoing title originally entitled X-Calibre.

Excalibur was billed by Claremont as a "cosmic comedy caper" which, thanks almost entirely to Davis, managed to be occasionally witty or amusing but rapidly descended into the boggling welter of alternate earths and potential futures that afflicted Claremont's stories. Damagingly for the character, Davis saw Brian as a buffoon, a straight man for the antics of the more bizarre creations in the strip (Sidebar: if anyone could recreate the lunacy of Gerber's Defenders, it would be Alan Davis)
Without Davis, however, and apart from a brief period where Warren Ellis wrote it as a techno-occult conspiracy thriller (introducing cynical mutant secret agent Pete Wisdom), Excalibur was a terrible comic for most of the late 80s and 90s. I shudder at the kewl 90s radness of Brian's stint as "Britannic".

 Claremont took a stab at Brian again in 2005, with the unloveable New Excalibur but he regained some respect and acclaim when Who-author Paul Cornell relaunched Captain Britain as a bona fide US title in 2008. Despite the unfortunate association with a motorway proposal, with its inclusion of Bronze Agers Blade, Dracula and the British heroes from the Invaders, I mean to pick up the collected versions of M13 one day, especially since I enjoyed Cornell's Knight and Squire. I just don't like the redesign of the Captain- it reminds me too much of these other guys:

 'Strewth! Captain Britain shouldn't look like a Nazi!

Brian was finally inducted as an Avenger during Marvel's Heroic Age event. If he is subsequently killed off again to show how merciless the Abomination or the Wrecking Crew is, in some upcoming crossover, I will not be amused.
The original CB isn't a great, lost treasure of the Bronze Age- he didn't have an original power-set, his supporting cast were cliched and crucially, he lacked a convincing archfoe- but it demonstrates how the most unprepossessing super hero can become a cult hit. Ironically, the real break-out character from Captain Britain was Betsy Braddock, the medieval-themed psi who became an asian reincarnation of the assassin Elektra, thanks to Jim Lee in the early 90s. The pneumatic Psylocke has been "focusing the totality of her telepathic abilities" for over twenty years.
If " Cheerful Chris" had stayed with the title, what might the Lion of London's adventures have been like? Appearances by Claremont favourites like Silver Samurai or the Impossible Man? Maybe a demonic storyline with Kate Fraser and the N'Garai? Magickal powers for Courtney Ross- perhaps a connection to Lady Daemon?

 Scottish sorceress Megan Daemon from Bizarre Adventures 1981

Very probably an X-Men guest-appearance. Ka-Zar- another Marvel aristo( from Derbyshire)? A job with Stark Enterprises? Some kind of redemption for the obnoxious Jacko? A confidant and tragic victim in Brian's tutor/landlord, Neil Mackenzie? Parallel Earths? Alien invasion? Definitely the devastation of London landmarks!

London's burning...

Besides Abslom Daak the Dalek-killer, there is another obscure connection between Brian Braddock and Dr. Who. Darkmoor and the Reavers are namechecked in Gary Russell's gloomy Silurian novel The Scales of Injustice (where those "misunderstood" reptile men kill one of Who fiction's stock fey, little scholboy Mary Sues as an experiment)
Last week, I listened to another First Doctor Companion Chronicle, which introduces a new audio regular, posh city trader Oliver Harper.I enjoy Peter Purves's querulous William Hartnell impression although it isn't quite as uncanny as Frazer Hines impersonating Troughton. Unfortunately,  The Perpetual Bond is boring and unfunny. The conceit of alien slave traders operating from the London Stock Exchange is a zany idea that would work in a comic book but on audio, it lacks fizz and daring. The alien Fulagrites are described as having "mushroomy" heads yet in reality, fulgarites are glassy tube-like structures formed in sand by lightning. Not fungoid at all then.There's very little sense of being in the Sixties at all ( except for one cringe-inducing scene where Steven hums the Marseillaise intro from All You Need Is Love. Really). It's the same bland, generic time-period evoked by Heartbeat and The Royal. The story might have worked better if it had starred Lady Hippolyta "Polly" Wright* where the stuffy, Establishment might be thrown into effective contrast with the groovy Sloane (and her excitable wee sailor chum).

I enjoyed Tom Allen's dry, camp and mocking persona on Big Brother's Big Mouth a year ago but I'm not convinced he adds anything to the Steven -Doctor dynamic. I'm guessing Oliver's secret is that he's Dirk Bogarde in Victim. If I'm right and he was about to be arrested for his homosexuality, I'm conflicted about whether it's a subject that works in the fantasy milieu of Sixties Who -despite the past presence on tv of Sky Silvestry, the Cassini Sisters, Jake Simmonds and, of course, Captain Jack I'd have to like Simon Guerrier's writing far more to want to find out for sure, though. On a positive note, the inner sleeve cover looks great. The original Sixties logo is a better design than the gimmicky DW-Police box of today.

Finally, I managed to find the cover of another Double Double comic online. Ths one featured the debut of Batgirl and of the Spellbinder. I'm still trying to find out which one included the Silver Age intro of Giganta in Wonder Woman.

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* I completely made up Polly's full Christian name and social standing a few years ago but I like it!