Captain Britain Omnibus

Product Information

So, this book is like a snapshot of a culture when it was still possible to be anti-facist, patriotic and good, a self-questioning fighter against intolerance, all at the same time, before cultures started to divide. Of all the Brian Braddock stories Marvel could include in an omnibus, I don't understand why this one merited inclusion.

The X-men annual is memorable for Psylocke ripping off her outer skin to reveal a steel form underneath. Yet both of these runs birthed something extraordinary into the comic lexicon, for a fleeting handful of years. I remember reading the early adventures of Captain Britain in the mid 70's and enjoying them, even though I was only 7 years old.

For example: Issue X may feature Daredevil and Spider-Man with a handful of pages at the end dedicated to Captain Marvel. Alan Davis is the unifying thread here, but it is still interesting to see each new author's contributions to the CB mythos and how everything relies on previous continuity. Alan Moore takes Captain Britain on a wild multi-versal ride, again combining the ideas of fate and destiny and further cementing Brain Braddock as a savior of the universe type.

He does a cracking team up with Captain America and Nick Fury against the Red Skull which lasts several issues.

And then the characters are handed back to Claremont, who will go on to use them in Excalibur, a book that's often a tribute to the ideas of Thorpe, Moore, Davis and Delano here.

But there was another reason I shunned it, unrelated to quality: Captain Britain was kind of a loser. Some later iterations seem to avoid 'politics' by emphasising the magical elements of his origin story although he subsequently gets integrated into the Avengers' story lines and is certainly not allowed to die off as an integral character although never again one of the top-liners. Now, thrill to a complete collection of Captain Britain's iconic UK adventures - from questing alongside the Black Knight, to battling Jim Jaspers and the Fury to prevent Earth from becoming a crooked world! Just lovely stuff, much of which was a mystery to me because of the way Marvel reprinted the stories in the early 90s. Moore's story, though, is not joyful at all: on my first read of it in the 90s it felt dramatic and unpredictable.Despite Captain Britain's atrocious original costume, I really enjoyed all of the early stories written by Chris Claremont.