BRITAIN PREVAILS - Captain Britain & MI13 Appreciation PART II

[The Sword Is Drawn]

And I think that's the crux of it. Certainly from 1993 up to this year Brian has been a pretty likeable character. Level headed, a strong leader, a calm and careful tactician, a fine and genuine hero.

Brian as we've seen him in Uncanny X-Force and Secret Avengers is anything but. He's shown as an arrogant, pompous and disrespectful bully, who makes rookie mistakes and loses his temper.

It's understandable for any Captain Britain fan to feel aggrieved. We'll just have to hope things improve.

[Panic]

And I think that's the crux of it. Certainly from 1993 up to this year Brian has been a pretty likeable character. Level headed, a strong leader, a calm and careful tactician, a fine and genuine hero.

I think in the spirit of honesty though, it has to be said that he's also been pretty dull.

In the Moore years he was the straight-man to the wild madness that surrounded him, and you couldn't help but empathise with his bewilderment and frustration at not understanding what was going on; in the Delano/Davis years he was the good guy being picked on by the government, and you sympathised with his increasing anger, and (I, at least) loved the little human touches that made him relatable: his bickering with Betsy, his (totally justified) sulking, him having a drink to wind down (without being an alcoholic)... those things were great.

In the team framework we've seen him in since, though, even under Davis' pen, he's been at best at little dull, and at worst, an unlikeable ****. He's pretty much a generic good guy, which is great in his own mag, but in a team setting, even when he's had a sympathetic writer, I've not really felt for him like I did in his own comic. Davis did a lot in his Excalibur run to mitigate CC's damage, but he never got Brian back to the guy I liked; even Davis' redeemed Brian was too much of a macho muscle-man for me (and that hair - why, Alan, why???), rather than the more relatable guy I remembered. He's slowly morphed into this aggressive-jock hero who gets angry and flies off the handle at situations that frankly don't warrant it - his bad-tempered snarks in his own comic were funny and the reader felt them justified, but since then he's often been a bad-tempered bully-boy. Unsympathetic, unrelatable, uninteresting. And I don't know whether that's the fault of the writers, or whether the character simply doesn't work in a team environment.

[The Sword Is Drawn]

I don't entirely agree with that, Panic.

I'd just like to add something I tagged on the end of my Blog post from the weekend. I think a lot of people forget where Brian went after Davis left, and I've had to fill in some blanks for a few people recently.

You know, since posting this article I have had a couple of people ask me just how I have this glowing opinion of Brian. They can see it from MI13, but that they never saw that from Excalibur.

So I asked them where they read up to on Excalibur. The answer was somewhere in the #40s/50s. What else happened in the run? To which I had to explain that quitting around the #50 mark they actually missed probably the most important character changing event for Brian in the whole decade, and one which certainly one which has had wide reaching effects in many stages of his development in the years since.

Brian's time lost in the timestream.

It wasn't popular at the time, because it came at the very start of Scott Lobdell's run on Excalibur, off-panel, and with only an editor's note to explain its occurrence. It was no more popular when Brian actually returned, because it was not as 'Captain Britain' but as the long haired automaton 'Britannic'.

Britannic initially claimed not to be Brian, but to be something different. It had no pupils in its eyes, a Fabio style haircut and a ceaseless need to ensure the future it had seen came to pass...

But as time went on more and more of Brian shone back through. He still had occasional 'flashforwards,' glimpses of the future, but it was clear that the time he spent there had left him forever changed. Having seen the whole of human history, front to back, as Lobdell's run gave way to Warren Ellis' we saw Brian decide that he believed all war, all fighting, to be ultimately pointless. He announced to the team that he was now both a Pacifist and would be removing himself from active duty. He remained with Excalibur though, as a non-combatant, overseeing the maintenance and improval of their tech.

Such as the Moonlight Flip, Excalibur's high tech transport. An incredibly technologically advanced craft, with a full state of the art medical bay. As Nightcrawler discovered, however (in having to engage in an air battle with Black Air) technologically advanced or no, Pacifist Brian had quite intentionally decided that it wouldn't actually have any on-board weapons systems... :)

This was really the turning point back towards what we have known since as the modern Brian. The Pacifist days did not last in entirity. Brian returned to duty in the long run, even reclaimed the mantle of 'Captain Britain,' but the Brian we read throughout that period and beyond was always shown as a shrewd tactician and negotiator. He was shown to be intelligent, calm and level-headed.

Heck, when Colossus admitted to Brian that he had gotten a little too close to Meggan, during Brian's brief spell away from the team in the late Excalibur the 80s Brian would probably have punched him out. Instead he simply went to Meggan, apportioned no blame on her, and apologised for having left her alone for so long.

He was a changed man. And it's important to know about these things, because without them the more recent run of Captain Britain & MI13, 2000s Excalibur limited series, even NEW Excalibur might seem like Brian was uncharacteristically calm and in control, compared to those early Excalibur issues.

Where in reality it was they which were quite the exception to the rule.

[Panic]

I have to admit, when Davis left (after #67), so did I. I think I picked up one or two issues of Ellis' run, but CB wasn't in it and I didn't love the art, so that was that. I pretty much stopped buying any comics after that. So, yeah, it's a period of Brian's history I'm completely dark on, and I honestly forget it existed most of the time.

[The Sword Is Drawn]

I have to admit, when Davis left (after #67), so did I. I think I picked up one or two issues of Ellis' run, but CB wasn't in it and I didn't love the art, so that was that. I pretty much stopped buying any comics after that. So, yeah, it's a period of Brian's history I'm completely dark on, and I honestly forget it existed most of the time.

Many people do. And yet without it Brian remains firmly stuck in that Claremont image. I don't claim that all those issue are great (They aren't) but they did change the character profoundly. Lobdell's 'Britannic' was terrible. The art and writing of that period is kinda painful to a re-reading now. But what it resulted in, even with Brian having a much lower profile role on the team, was a significant part of building the character to a much more mature, level-headed and stronger character.

And even include his being depowered by the Dragons of the Crimson Dawn in that. Not a great story. Great Salvador Larocca art, but not a great story. But in removing him from the team for a while it actually built up an anticipation for his return, and showed a much more humble, much more full of humility guy, to return for those final few issues.

I always view Brian as a complete article. And when you look at those 35 years of stories focussing on any one perios as a sole basis for the character IS impossible. He's had peaks and troughs, as any character does. But the argument that inconsisten writing from different creators should give any writer carte blanche to focus on whatever they want is, at least to my mind, wrong. Because people who have bought into previous series will not stick around if they feel you're writing a character in a fashion they simply cannot recognise from all the years they have invested into reading.

There expectations. I feel that Marvel have got their target market completely wrong here. Captain Britain & MI13 sprang up a cult following which surpassed that which they expected. The bottom line remains that if it wasn't for those readers, this forgotten and growing fanbase, having been persistently vocal about Brian they wouldn't have ever bothered putting him on an Avengers book. And yet, having now done so, they are using a characterisation which is so absolutely at odds with all recent characterisations of the character.

On face value that seems to be one of the dumbest moves a publisher could make. I can understand the concept of trying to bring new readers to the character, but I'm really not sure this version of Brian with gather that many new fans. He's fundametally unlikeable so far. The likely outcome is gaining very few new fans and alienating the majority of long term fans. That doesn't seem likely to result in higher sales anywhere.

[Panic]

I wouldn't say he's fundamentally unlikeable in the SA issues I've glanced through. In UXF, yes, he was totally set up to be the bad guy from what I could see, and I hate that he seemed to have forgiven Jamie, who in my mind is/was a totally irredeemable slave-trading piece of crap. In SA (and I've not read the latest issue, just seen Beast's speech) he's been a bit stiff and authoritarian, but he's been okay - in another group of heroes he'd stand out as a bit of a dick, but in SA that's pretty much par for the course.

In SA, I believe Remender's favourite is probably Venom.In the SA thread I saw Monty complain that Venom was cracking the sort of jokes that Ant-Man is known for, and it's true, Venom is the cool guy who gets the good lines; plus Hawkeye was just kind of horrible to him, which tends to make the reader sympathetic to the poor guy. So Venom is definitely writer's pet I think. But Beast's diatribe against Brian was also pretty nasty, especially when they had seemed to be friends, so (bearing in mind I've seen only an isolated page or two from the issue) I think the reader's sympathies must be partly with CB in this instance.

It's true he's come across as arrogant, but there is obviously an arc unfolding here. What's annoying to us long term CB fans is it's unnecessarily going over old ground (and if you remember Wonder Man in the late Seventies/early Eighties, his 3 or 4 issue arc where he became terrified of dying and was forced to confront that fear sadly became the norm; I lost track of the number of times he was a guest star in some other hero's comic and reverted back to the hero frozen with fear who has to be helped over it - depressingly very similar to what's gone on with CB), and by going over that old ground it kind of reinforces that image of Brian we all would rather leave dead and buried. But I still think there's hope.

[Gryphon]

Was Iron Age a good portrayal of Brian?

[Gryphon]

BTW, since I mentioned Brits and pro wrestling a little while ago I thought I should mention that WWE's current Divas(women's) champion is British.

[Panic]

Was Iron Age a good portrayal of Brian?

Considering Rob Williams is British and a fan of the Captain Britain comics, I felt it was a little off. Not horrible by any means, but he had Brian using slang like "sod off" which he tended not to do in the Moore/Delano/Davis years, plus he was angry and aggressive without really anything else. I kind of missed the humility and more thoughtful, gentle, nice-guy side of him (that seems a very girly thing to say, but it's true) that we saw in his own mag. Although he did use to get angry a fair bit in his own series, he was never a thug. So I guess I thought it was a bit one-note. But then I'm a bit picky.

[Loki]

Considering Rob Williams is British and a fan of the Captain Britain comics, I felt it was a little off. Not horrible by any means, but he had Brian using slang like "sod off" which he tended not to do in the Moore/Delano/Davis years, plus he was angry and aggressive without really anything else. I kind of missed the humility and more thoughtful, gentle, nice-guy side of him (that seems a very girly thing to say, but it's true) that we saw in his own mag. Although he did use to get angry a fair bit in his own series, he was never a thug. So I guess I thought it was a bit one-note. But then I'm a bit picky.

Given it was Brian in the middle of the Jaspers' Warp, I think we can forgive Brian being a bit angry.

[The Sword Is Drawn]

Was Iron Age a good portrayal of Brian?

As a snapshot of Brian, slap bang in the middle of the Jaspers Warp lead up it was understandable. Again, maybe a little atypical of Brian as a whole, but this was a point in time where Jaspers had warped reality to his will, and taken over Britain. It's understandable that in that period Brian was pretty angry. And not just weith Jaspers or The Vixen, with the US Heroes for not noticing.

[Whitster]

S'up peeps.

Been doing some catching up with comics over the last few days as I weened myself off them for a few weeks due to redundancy at work. I've got something new to go to straight away now so I've been slowly picking up series that I missed and not bothering with ones I didn't notice I wasn't getting in order to lower my comic budget.

Anyway back to how this relates to the topic, I got round to picking up XForce #24, the epilogue to the Otherworld arc. This really has lead me to believe that Remender has had very little exposure to CB outside of Excalibur and possibly the Moore/Davis run which he claims to have read, but it seems he certianly hasn't read the Delano run based on his confrontation with Fantomex in this. We're expected to believe that somehow Jamies death has made Brian see his hipocrasy in sentencing Fantomex for a necessary killing, when this is the same Brian who left the very same Jamie to be imprisioned and tortured for his actions before and also caved in a blokes skull for attacking his sister?

[Panic]

I know. I've started to think of Brian from the Marvel U.K. stories as a totally different guy from the one from Excalibur onwards. He's certainly written like one.

[The Sword Is Drawn]

S'up peeps.

Been doing some catching up with comics over the last few days as I weened myself off them for a few weeks due to redundancy at work. I've got something new to go to straight away now so I've been slowly picking up series that I missed and not bothering with ones I didn't notice I wasn't getting in order to lower my comic budget.

Anyway back to how this relates to the topic, I got round to picking up XForce #24, the epilogue to the Otherworld arc. This really has lead me to believe that Remender has had very little exposure to CB outside of Excalibur and possibly the Moore/Davis run which he claims to have read, but it seems he certianly hasn't read the Delano run based on his confrontation with Fantomex in this. We're expected to believe that somehow Jamies death has made Brian see his hipocrasy in sentencing Fantomex for a necessary killing, when this is the same Brian who left the very same Jamie to be imprisioned and tortured for his actions before and also caved in a blokes skull for attacking his sister?

It's pretty weird all round. The whole 'family line' which Brian and Jamie spent earlier issues bullying Betsy, trying to force her to adopt, is just plain odd. There's no evidence of it in the past. Brian's stance on Fantomex, wanting the guy erased without even hearing reason for his actions, seems greatly out of character. In those early two issues he kinda comes across as a monster. By the last issues of the arc he becomes more personal, but it seems like a real sudden change in character again. Certainly Betsy insisting that he still gets to be the hero seems a little odd by his earlier actions.

Brian does come across as vaguely bipolar throughout the arc. It very confusing.

Sorry to hear about the redundancy, Whitster. That sucks. Hope the new gig works out.

[Whitster]

Cheers man, got a contracting position at another council doing the same job for more money, which means I can use the redundancy money for a well deserved holiday, so things aren't too bad.