Dipped in magic, clothed in science: Captain Britain

Welcome To Images Degrading Forever!

This week I start on a brand new project and as usual I have a lot of questions, but this time rather different types of questions all mostly around super-hero continuity

But it's not as bad as it sounds…

So here is the scenario - there is an existing character that has appeared in print form over a number of years, a character that has promise, enough promise to keep coming back

To keep coming back despite only being known to a reasonably small audience

To keep coming back despite being at one point best considered an amalgam of existing Marvel USA heroes part Spider-man and part Thor, stuck somewhere between science and myth

To keep coming back to a UK audience the same audience that one could argue already has its own myths and legends and therefore less need for four colour super heroes a point made all the more clear by using those very same myths and legends as the characters underpinnings…

To keep coming back to a UK audience when it was mostly written by Americans, who would not necessarily know what the UK audience wants and essentially just graft those myths onto their amalgam hero (and also have never visited some of the places they insisted setting their stories in)

To keep coming back even though the characters titular title got cancelled (several times all told) and along the way gaining what one would argue is at least a rather confusing and possibly contradictory contintinty

So - we have the character with promise - and now the mission is to re launch this character and to not only relaunch him to the UK audience and give the character his full and proper due but also to see if its possible to get the attention of a USA audience as well

So what would the approach be - This is a Marvel character we are talking about, so one must assume or conclude that the best thing would be to press the continuity erase button

and forget anything ever happened beforehand….

Especially as this is also a number 1 relaunch issue 

Why risk alienating and confusing a new audience right? I imagine this is routine argument amongst the big two what with a dc crisis every other year and a marvel now, then and probably later as well 

But this comic is a wonderful exception to the rule - and in the hands of none other than Alan Davis who simply rips up the continuity rules book and focuses instead on making all the characters great, real and telling the best story he could 

Of course the character is none other than…

So how to start the story?

How better than to promise action, adventure, intrigue, peril, humour and more just in the first page alone - a perfect encapsulation of the promise of great things to come…

So join me next week and we take a journey into myth, memory and legend