Opinion

Captain Britain (Trade Paperback)

Writer: Alan Moore, Artist: Alan Davis
Published by Marvel

Once upon a time, Marvel Comics decided that they really needed a Bristish equivalent of Captain America. Unfortunately, they put the creation of this new icon into the hands of American creators, and what came out betrayed a rather stereotypical view of Britain and British culture. So Brian Braddock, the soon-to-be Captain, gained his powers from Merlin in a stone circle, and you always had the impression that a Victorian pea-souper fog and a jolly London bobby chasing urchins in the street were just around the corner. Suffice it to say, the character wasn't popular, and nobody was very interested. Eventually though, along came comic-authoring proto-God Moore, who took the Captain and his sidekick, the elf, Jackdaw (you see - I wasn't exagerating about the stereotypes....) to an alternate Earth, where he was hunted down by the unstoppable cyborg killing machine called The Fury. And killed.

And then things got interesting.

This book, collecting Moore and Davis's subsequent outstanding run on the character represents both creators in the formative stages of what are now recognised as outstanding creative talents. I read all these stories when they first came out (was it really that long ago?), and couldn't wait to read each new installment. There are entire sections of this run that I still remember word for word, it made that big an impact on me back then.

The most astonishing thing about the stories in this collection is the sheer imagination of it all. Moore's ideas are rooted solidly in the superhero tradition, but he does things with them that no one had ever done before. His is a world where we can see the effects of a superheroic lifestyle, and they're not all pretty. Linda MacQuillan, the Captain UK of her world, saw every living superhuman slaughtered by The Fury before escaping to Captain Britain's world, and she's a wreck: Running scared, seeing the course of events with which she's so familiar starting to be repeated in the world she's come to, this is a broken superhero; one who actually wets herself when confronted by her nightmare-made-flesh. And that's only one of countless outstanding concepts Moore pulls out of his bag, something new on almost every page.

The other Alan's art has always been something special, drawing on a fine tradition of cartooning, yet at the same time adding an astonishing facility for facial realism. You know what these people are thinking just by looking at the expressions he's drawn. And cutting loose on Moore's amazing ideas only gives him the opportunity to make the already-astonishing something truly incredible. His style has arguably matured over the years, but at this stage, he's already demonstrating the flair and visual quirkiness that are his trademarks.

The production values of this collection are very high, but there are problems with the original source material. These stories were originally published by Marvel UK, who operated on the kind of budgets that made shoestrings look chunky by comparison, so elements such as the lettering, for instance, especially in the earlier installments, is significantly substandard.

That couldn't stop me recommending this collection in the highest possible terms, though. Among all the gleeful madness (The Special Executive, Mad Jim Jaspers, Merlin and Roma, The Vixen and Slaymaster among many others), there's a sequence here that I think single-handedly made a comic fan out of me. A two-page spread of the precognitive Cobweb having a fit while recounting the terror she sees ahead. The images pile up horror on horror, and the words make devastatingly clear the catastrophic nature of what she's seeing. The final words of the spread are "I see the future....." (turn the page) "...and it is cancelled." (over a totally black page broken only by the standard sound effect of The Fury's weapon).

It gave me chills twenty years ago. And it still does.