Art For Art’s Sake #386: Celebrating 50 Years Of Captain Britain (Part 2)

by Richard Bruton

Welcome, once more, to Art For Art’s Sake, where, as is my want, I’ve taken over the whole thing to celebrate Captain Britain, 50 years old this month. Here, we’re back in 1982, where I pick up an issue of Marvel Superheroes and my life is transformed …

That poor-quality scan of a George Perez cover for the Marvel UK monthly anthology Marvel Superheroes issue 388 has incredible meaning for me. It was when I first properly experienced Captain Britain, getting in on the final episode, with Alan Moore and Alan Davies taking the good Captain to dark, dark places, and something that absolutely hooked the 11-year-old me.

It’s 50 years to the month since Captain Britain got his introduction into UK comics lore. I covered that in part 1 last week, leading up to the pivotal moment in my comics reading, with me picking up MSH 388, as my poor memory tells me, on a family holiday in 1982.

But nevertheless, no matter where I first bought the actual comic, this was that one moment where I just knew my life had changed. It was perhaps my defining moment in comics, where I knew I’d discovered the one comic strip that completely changed my reading life.

Because inside was the Captain Britain tale The Graveyard Shift, written by Moore and drawn by Davis …

To be honest, it’s a crap moment to start with Captain Britain, seeing as these five pages dropped me straight into a nightmare reality warp caused by Mad Jim Jaspers, where the Captain finds himself on a multiversal world that’s not his own, hunted down by the unstoppable hero-killing cybiote that is The Fury, and ending with him dying, alone and desperate. But it didn’t matter to young me. Here, with my first proper meeting with the Captain, I was absolutely, utterly, instantly enthralled.

Within just five pages, Moore and Davis covered so much, with a density of storytelling that summarised all that had gone before, before Moore proceeded to rip everything down to deliver his own take on things. Jaspers explains to a broken Captain his plot to rise to power politically, with a mission to demonise and outlaw superhumans that led to the eventual creation of The Fury and its mission to wipe out every superhuman on the planet, except old Mad Jim himself. Now, Captain Britain is the only superhuman left, and although he’s not of this Earth, The Fury is tracking him down relentlessly, his death practically inevitable.

Seeing the hero of the comic broken, beaten, driven to despair and hopelessness, fearing he’s going to lose his mind on this alternate world that isn’t his, was a revelation to my young comic-reading mind. This simply wasn’t the way you treated your heroes.

It all ends with Captain Britain crashing down into a graveyard, with a host of strange superhero names across the gravestones, names I’d eventually come to realise were nods to the great and the good of Brit comics of old: Iron Tallon, The Arachnid, Android Andy, even Miracleman, to say nothing of Captain UK, another character that would go on to play a major role in what was to come.

And then, that final, devastating page. Oh my, it tore at me, a shattered Captain Britain screaming in the mist, with the Fury appearing, death personified, over the Captain’s shoulder. And then, the death, so final, brutal … the Fury rendering Captain Britain to nothing more than a rag, a bone, a hank of hair.

And seeing as this is Art For Art’s Sake, let’s just take a moment to praise Davis here. Seeing his earliest works on Captain Britain and comparing them to what he was doing here … there’s just no comparison. Yet it’s just 13 months between his debut on Captain Britain and the art you’ve just seen. It’s a phenomenal improvement, an artist truly coming into his own, into his style. Quite incredible work.

Graveyard Shift might have been just five pages long, but it changed everything I knew about comics. This was NOTHING like anything I’d read before. And I was hooked. Of course, as I say, it was the absolute worst time to get hooked into the Captain’s adventures, as this was the last appearance of Captain Britain in Marvel Superheroes, with that ‘Next: A Rag, A Bone, A Hank Of Hair’ not paying off until the first issue of Daredevils, a maddeningly long (at least when you’re 11, turning 12 years old.

But that was it; I was hooked. My comic reading life changed with those five pages of Graveyard Shift; Moore and Davis changed my comic-reading world with a spectacular, storyline that turned my young world upside down. Whilst Moore and Davis’ Captain Britain may not be the greatest comic I’ve ever read, nothing will remove it from that special place in my heart.

Thanks to Captain Britain, I went looking for more of Moore and more of Davis, the first comic names I actively sought out, and that led on to Warrior magazine, V for Vendetta, Marvelman, The Bojeffries Saga, and set me on a path that continues to this day. Basically, it’s all Alan Moore and Alan Davis’s fault. I hope one day to be able to thank them for that.

And yes, I’m aware it’s an Art for Art’s Sake that’s rather short on the actual art. But hey, it’s my column, and I’ll do it just the way I see fit. In those five pages of Alan Davis art, you have all the fundamentals that set me on the path I still follow today. But just to keep you all happy, let’s end with a few pages of art that the Moore/Davis Captain Britain tales turned me on to… starting with the cover to Warrior issue 1, something I picked up immediately following me reading that Moore/Davis Captain Britain … issue 1, with art by Steve Dillon …