Short Box: Captain Britain Omnibus
Captain Britain Omnibus
#HC-A
| Release: | Apr 13, 2022 |
Creators
| Writer | Jamie Delano | Steve Craddock | Mark Farmer | Dez Skinn | Gary Friedrich | Roy Thomas | Larry Lieber | Chris Claremont | Grant Morrison | Dave Thorpe | Len Wein | Jim Lawrence | Bob Budiansky | Mike Collins | Paul Neary | Alan Davis | Steve Parkhouse |
| Cover Artist | Alan Davis |
| Penciller | Paul Neary | Howard Purcell | John Stokes | Alan Davis | Herb Trimpe | Ron Wilson | John Buscema | Noel Davis | Pablo Marcos Studio | Pablo Marcos | George Tuska | Steve Parkhouse | Mike Collins | John Byrne | Bob Budiansky |
| Inker | Noel Davis | Pablo Marcos Studio | Frank Giacoia | Tom Palmer Sr. | Mike Esposito | John Stokes | Alan Davis | Fred Kida | Mark Farmer | Dave Hunt | Pablo Marcos | George Tuska | Paul Neary | Dan Adkins |
| Colorist | Andy Seddon | Louise Cassell | Nick Abadzis | George Roussos | Helen Nally | Steve White | Marie Severin | Andy Yanchus | Don Warfield | Stuart Place | Glynis Oliver | Clara Mulvaney | Brian H. Moore | Dave Hunt | Mike Esposito |
| Letterer | Richard Starkings | Jenny O’Conner | Artie Simek | Irv Watanabe | Stan Richardson | John Aldrich | Steve Craddock | Sam Rosen | Karen Mantlo | Elitta Fell | Bruce D. Patterson | Annie Halfacree | Peri Godbold | Tom Orzechowski |
| Editor | Ian Rimmer | Dez Skinn | Archie Goodwin | Neil Tennant | Danny Fingeroth | Paul Neary | Bernie Jaye | Tom DeFalco | Larry Lieber | Chris Gill | Ann Nocenti | Stan Lee | Tim Hampson |
Though he’d been around in the Marvel UK line for years by that point, my first encounter with Brian Braddock AKA Captain Britain was his brief appearance in Contest of Champions. I next got to know him a bit better in the series that sort of spun out of that contest, The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, though some time between his first entry and his entry in the next edition his costume, powers, and origin had changed.
After that, he popped up on this side of the pond in a couple of annuals, first from The New Mutants and next from The Uncanny X-Men, both of which were illustrated by Alan Davis and are reprinted in this volume.
Shortly after that second annual, he became a regular fixture in my life as one of the members of Excalibur, which was, at least initially, from the same creative team as the two annuals.
There used to be an Air Force Base about 100 miles from where I lived when I was younger, and one day in my junior year my mother let me skip school so that I could accompany her, my sister, and my niece on a trip to said Air Force Base where my sister, whose husband was in the Army and away for basic training at the time, could pick up some things from the BX and commissary.
It was also near the largest city in the Upper Peninsula, so we went there to do some shopping as well, which included a stop at the comic shop for me, during which I picked up a trade paperback collecting some of the original UK stories starring Captain Britain and his twin sister Betsy AKA Psylocke, which were mostly by Jamie Delano and Alan Davis. It had been put out as a bit of a primer for people who had were reading Excalibur and who wanted to know more about the purple-haired lady who had joined the X-Men.
Though he’s not mentioned in the credits up-front – though his name does show up in credits of the stories themselves – there was a run of adventures written by Alan Moore that immediately preceded those stories, and while I did read some of them years later, there remained a lot of Captain Britan stories that I had not read. This omnibus filled that gap.
And honestly? For the most part, I think I preferred the gap.
I don’t know if the majority of this tome would have been as much of a slog as it proved to be if I hadn’t gone into it knowing that there was good stuff eventually waiting for me, but a slog is exactly what it was.
The initial stories were sort of standard Marvel fare for the time, and while there were some interesting bits in the early stories that guest-starred Captain Britain’s shield-slinging counterpart from the colonies and Nick Fury, once his stories became more fully, well, British, his feature didn’t actually last very long and was eventually cancelled.
He was then revived as something of a guest star, who really didn’t do much, in a very long serialized adventure starring the Black Knight, which eventually led to him getting his own feature again as well as a new costume and new powers, which led to the Moore stories, which led to the stories I knew.
While most of the stories themselves weren’t interesting, it was interesting to observe how the character and his backstory transformed over time, moving him from being something of a British Spider-Man – his first American appearance was in an issue of Marvel Team-Up paired up with the wallcrawler – to becoming something more akin to a British Superman.
His personality also evolved – mostly in the form of actually developing one – as he went from a somewhat wide-eyed and mild-mannered youth eager to do the right thing but struggling with the burden of responsibility, to being a more jaded and cynical jerk who would eventually do the right thing only grudgingly and after considerable cajoling. In the course of his time as Captain Britain he learned that the world was not nearly so rational as he believed when he was a young physics student, that his powers were inherent and not the result of the magical paraphernalia he’d been gifted, that he, in fact, was not fully human, and that there was a whole multiverse and an entire Captain Britain Corps filled with others who were all variations on the same theme.
He moved from squaring off against an old man who had a robot hawk – which Brian himself had built – to battling a multiverse-travelling killing machine that puts any Terminator to shame in terms of relentlessness and being unstoppable.
The boring stuff is very, very boring – How many times can a story hinge on whether he can concentrate enough to maintain a force field after getting bumped on the noggin? A lot, apparently – but the good stuff is very, very good, and not just because of the fantastic art from Davis. For my money, Betsy – decisively – taking out Brian’s evil counterpart from another universe and Brian confronting his old enemy Slaymaster with similar decisiveness after the latter had blinded Betsy are some of the best moments in cape comics.
If nothing else, I’m glad to have the stories that immediately preceded the familiar stories in print even if I could really do without the rest.
And hey, at least his original costume design was also cool, so that much remained consistent throughout his adventures.
Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.
