Heavens to Betsy!

Welcome to part 4 of

This week Dai "Hard" Thomas digs further into the personal history of Brian Braddock, which among many other things features 2 different appearances by both Brian and his twin sister Elizabeth "Betsy" Braddock…

Betsy first made her appearance in Captain Britain issue 8 "Riot on Regent Street"

Which, really should have been called "Riot nowhere near Regent Street" given that Regent Street has rather unique architecture which singularly fails to appear within…

Harsh words?! - Well, what did Alan Moore think?

In his essay "A short history of Britain" which originally appeared in Marvel Superheroes 389 (which appeared before he wrote his Captain Britain rebirth story line ,"A rag, a bone, a hank of hair") he had this to say…

"American writers and artists, when called upon to depict Britain, invariably decide that it looks either like modern day Chicago or that it most closely resembles Bulgaria somewhere around the turn of the century.  In both instances the policemen dress like something out of Sir Robert Peel's wildest nightmares and the remainder of the characters are unable to utter the most simple sentences without getting all their aitches in the wrong place.  This has been one of the problems plaguing Captain Britain until fairly recently"

That aside for a moment - Within a few panels of being introduced by Chris Claremont

Betsy was showing some sign of physic ability…

Which Alan Moore also mentions in the self-same essay…

"We was told that Betsy possessed physic powers"

and then

"everyone forgot about Betsy's embarrassing physic powers"

and concluded by saying…

"We may even find out what happened to Betsy Braddock and her Psychic powers.

Do not adjust your reading habits. The best is yet to come even though I says so myself as shouldn't"

So again, we had a start of a story and character developed by Chris Claremont (just like Dai Thomas last week) which was not progressed much further by any of the subsequent writers that followed

That is of course until Alan Moore made good on his promise in The Daredevils issue 03 "Thicker Than Water" as also illustrated by Alan Davis

In which Betsy calls Brian out of the blue (well okay more like out of the purple…)

And they initially do not even recognise each other…

and Betsy is developed from there onwards

In this particular issue she is both the sounding board and the grounding for Brian Braddock, she represents the readers point of view

For all of the fantastic epic and incredible reality bending stories of Alan Moore's Captain Britain, I personally preferrer something a little more human and grounded like these Alan Davis stories that followed

For reasons which hopefully you will see as we continue

NEXT WEEK:- We start to delve into the origin of Captain Britain himself...