Dear Britain

For some months, I had planned a blog post, reviewing Captain Britain books to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Marvel's Lion of London. However, after my last week of teaching in Elgin and in the throes of moving house during the Tattie Holidays, I don't have much time today.

So, instead, this will be a pictorial birthday celebration for the House of Ideas first "homegrown" hero, beginning with:

I picked this hardback up at a bargain price in The Works, Inverness. It collects most of the weekly CB adventures from the 70s. How could I have forgotten the beautiful Buscema art which graces the interminable Red Skull/ Nick Fury arc or the Lord Hawk issues? Unfortunately, CB is virtually a guest-star in his own strip: a Saturday morning movie serial for Captain America and SHIELD. Brian Braddock also seems to regress to an adolescent in this period too, tinkering with a robot raptor for batty old Lord Hawk.

In the summer, I got this hardback reprint in Elgin's Asda, published along with Alan Davis's The Nail. It's fascinating to see the development of Alan Moore as he blends  Claremont's dystopian tropes from X-Men with Davis's penchant for psychedelia. It's bleak stuff and grimly apposite in Brexit Britain but the retooled guardsman CB is basically a foil for Moore's own creations.

A little later, I also tracked down a cheap-ish ebay copy of this trade. I quite liked Cornell's application of the New Age elements touched on in his Doctor Who New Adventures novels. But, yet again, CB didn't seem like the lead in his own series: Black Knight and Fazia- even Spitfire- were all more interesting.

So, the uniting factor seems to be a disinclination to have the titular hero lead his own series. I have never been a great fan of the Davis costume and, if Captain Britain is ever to return to action, I want to see the original version, complete with quarterstaff. While others bemoan his similarities to DD and Spidey, they never seem to acknowledge that he is a creation of magic, where those heroes are creations of science, specifically radiation.

It seems to me that there has rarely been a better time for a superhero who could encompass the admirable qualities of British culture, in an era when the one party state's insularity, xenophobia and fear rule the waves.

All images are presumed copyright of their respective owners