Captain Britain Returns

I don't think I've made any secret of my love for the Captain Britain character. Back in the 70s, I was the right age to get excited about discovering a hero who was quintessentially British, occupying the same world I lived in.

By the time Alan Moore and Alan Davis revamped the mythology in the 80s, I was hooked. Right up to the gut-wrenching moment when Marvel UK announced the character was crossing the Atlantic to join the roster of the major Marvel heroes.

Captain Britain an X-Man? Betty Braddock transformed into an Asian styled Ninja? These were not the characters I had invested years of reading in. Even when the Excalibur title created a British version of the X-Men, I wasn't convinced. Sure, many elements of the old mythology were still there, but Cap was no longer the star of his own book. If anything, he had become an also-ran, a second or third tier character shoe-horned into the X-Men world with all the subtlety of a round peg in the proverbial square hole.

Over the years, I dipped into the comics occasionally, in the hope of a return to form. Instead I would see the destruction of many of the best-laid elements of the Cap back-story. The last straw was the horrific Chuck Austen storyline in Avengers that sought to create a new Captain Britain. This female Cap lasted a mere handful of issues before becoming a footnote. Marvel saw the error of their ways, and without much fanfare, the real Cap was back in a new version of Excalibur.

This week sees the launch of the first Captain Britain titled comic in two decades, albeit with the addition of a new super team. Captain Britain and MI:13 is being written by Paul Cornell - a man who knows  thing or two about English heritage characters - so there is more than a wisp of hope that we may see a treatment that seeks to reestablish Captain Britain as a major force. In the world of American Marvel comics, Cap will always lag behind his more famous New York colleagues.  But there is at least some hope that we may see the character given room to forge his own unique and British mythology once more, instead of merely being a face in the background of an X-Men group shot.