PUBLISHER: MARVEL UK (1990-1991)
WRITERS: DAN ABNETT & JOHN TOMLINSON
ARTIST: GARY ERSKINE
As discussed elsewhere, the late eighties and early nineties were a time of give and take for comic fans. The give was that Watchmen, DKR, Deadline and Zenith had made the idea of grown-ups buying comics seem strangely normal; the take was that we had to call the things graphic novels and that everyone writing for the things suddenly thought they were Alan fucking Moore. Marvel UK rarely needed much of an excuse to overreach themselves and after finally begrudgingly admitting no-one liked Dragon's Claws, Death's Head or The Sleeze Brothers their next attempt to be a proper publisher came in the form of Knights of Pendragon.
It took me a while to warm to Paul Cornell's interpretation of Pete Wisdom in the character's rocky solo series but here, as the kingpin of MI13 and master tactician of British superheroes, he's on top form so fair play. Indeed, Cornell writes strong for everyone here from Brian (whose relationship with Meggan, one of the most charming, warm and real of the whole Marvel Universe, is captured perfectly), Blade and Dane Whitman right down to a significant cameo from Doctor Doom.
Captain Britain was in danger of becoming a failure during the early 1980s. His original series had never quite caught on, largely through a succession of disinterested American creative teams unwilling or unable to move beyond stereotypical British characters, dialogue and settings; the much-trumpeted original Captain Britain comic was cancelled within nine months. The strip itself staggered on for a while in Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain with constantly shifting groups of Marvel US jobbers making the thing before that title too folded, merging with another title but leaving Captain Britain out of print.
Dave Thorpe's run on Captain Britain doesn't get a lot of good press, and in some ways, it's easy to see why. The strips were omitted from the Alan Moore/Alan Davis TPB despite their close connection and received wisdom goes along the lines that Thorpe's writing was so muddled and poor that Dez Skinn had to cancel one of Marvel UK's longest-running titles and bring in another writer in some attempt to sort the mess out. This isn't quite fair. Thorpe does display a lack of discipline and he's certainly not on the level of Moore, but the issues aren't especially confusing. That said having read the Moore material (which does give a more clear explanation for some of the events of Thorpe's run) so many times that it's hard to perceive what many readers found to be so baffling.
This book contains the first 23 issues of Captain Britain's UK weekly series. It's all on high-quality paper, with nice forewords from Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe, and even a replica of the mask given away with Captain Britain #1 (though whether you feel like cutting this out and ruining your book is down to personal taste). The art benefits from being squashed down to US-format sized pages too, looking much more detailed than it does in t he original comics, and the cover for each issue is faithfully reproduced.
