Art For Art’s Sake #388: Celebrating 50 Years Of Captain Britain (Part 4)

Once more, one last time, let’s celebrate my favourite hero in comics, Captain Britain … first published in October 1976 and now 50 years old …

As I’ve been saying through these four special Art For Art’s Sakes — absolutely indulgent, but what the hell, after nearly 300 of these, I reckon I’m allowed a little indulgence — Captain Britain was a massive part of my early comics education. It properly set me on the path to where I am right now. And yes, basically it’s all Alan Davis and Alan Moore’s fault.

Last time we spoke, we covered the seminal Captain Britain run by Moore and Davis in The Daredevils. Sadly, 11 issues was all it got before the Captain moved to the pages of The Mighty World of Marvel issues #7-#16 (Dec 1983- Sept 1984). But in just seven episodes (issues 7-13) from Moore/Davis, culminating in a near-perfect finale to the whole Captain Britain run, and three episodes by Davis writing and providing the art (assisted by Steve Craddock and Mike Collins) in issues #14-#16, acting as a good coda to it all, we have something that still holds up, to me, as one of the greatest superhero sagas of all time.

Okay then, let’s kick off with The Mighty World of Marvel issue 7, which opens up on the final seven Moore/Davis Captain Britain episodes, where we’d see the culmination of all that had gone before, the return of the unstoppable killing machine, The Fury (still the number 1 super-villain in comics history for me), we’d see another Earth warped and twisted into insanity by Mad Jim Jaspers, and we’d see a hero fulfil their destiny, just not the one we were perhaps expecting.

All of it starts with a dramatic tonal shift. Gone was the lightness, the comedy, the ridiculous space epics and huge supporting cast of The Daredevils. Instead, from the very first MWOM episode, we were presented with a bleak and devastated Britain, caught up in the madness of the Jaspers warp and the realisation that our hero was impotent and powerless to do anything to save his country.

It all opens in MWOM issue 7 with the most chilling, low-key tale, possibly the single best Captain Britain strip there’s ever been, eight pages of brilliance … ‘The Candlelight Dialogues’.

With ‘The Candlelight Dialogues’, Moore and Davis take us into a mad world, revealed through the conversation between two inmates of Jaspers’ internment camps. One of them is Meggan, later to become the Captain’s wife and fellow hero in Excalibur, but here, she’s just the means to tell a terrifying, dark tale of a country where Mad Jim Jaspers has taken control, his reality-shifting powers turning this into another crooked world. This Britain is a fascist police state, with internment camps and nightly curfews, where the terrified people live in fear of the ‘Beetles’, Jaspers’ armoured police force, spiriting away anyone who’s different, always looking for those with powers.

Oh, this really wasn’t your normal superhero comic at all.

If the earlier Captain Britain was that little bit Marvelman, this was definitely more V for Vendetta in tone. Indeed, the prisoner’s conversation of ‘Candlelight Dialogues’ we read here could be seen as the precursor to that in V for Vendetta where Evey chats to Valerie, published almost a year later in Warrior Magazine (the episodes Vermin & Valerie, issues 24 & 25, Nov & Dec 1984).

But where Evey’s world is an all too real possibility in V for Vendetta, the twisted world of Captain Britain is still one rooted in superhero ideas and a sense of the comedic and surreal. Jaspers’ world might be one of a fascist nightmare, but the man behind it is the evil supervillain writ large, a psychopathic clown twisting Britain to his mad whims, chaotic, comedic even, capable of horrifying slapstick, Groucho Marx with an Uzi, The Joker as God.

In your normal superhero saga, Captain Britain and his group would race to the rescue, assembling, Avengers-like, to team up and bring down the bad guy. But Captain Britain, right from the early Dave Thorpe stories and especially with the Moore/Davis run, was never anything like your normal superhero saga.

So, instead of Captain Britain the hero, we see Captain Britain in hiding, underground, doing what he can – and that isn’t all that much. With Saturnyne, Betsy Braddock, Captain UK, and others, he’s running and hiding from Jaspers and the Beetles, ineffectual, a man whose mind was never the strongest, failing to cope in a mad, mad world.

Eventually the Captain takes action, immediately thrown down the rabbit hole by Moore and Davis, determined to make him suffer, it seems, as he gets an idea of just what’s in store for him and how pitifully out of his depth he is as the madness of Jaspers’ warp becomes clear. He and we had only really seen it in passing before, but now we get the full effect, and it’s a terrifying crooked world indeed.

And then comes the return of The Fury, a villain so unstoppable that it’s crossed dimensions to do its job: to kill all superheroes, with the Captain being one that got away.

The Captain’s fear is palpable; the killing machine that’s already dispatched him once is something he’s never beaten, only managed, with the help of The Special Executive back in The Daredevils issue 11, to slow it down long enough for them to run.

You can see it through the first couple of pages of the showdown, issue 11, that fear, just before The Fury careers into him, unstoppable, unbeatable, relentless…

From here on in, it’s a Captain Britain strip where the Captain is a bit player, as Moore and Davis move to ‘Endgame’, the final battle between creator and creation, madman and unstoppable killing machine, Jaspers and The Fury warping themselves into increasingly insane new shapes, a cartoon brought to the page, Jaspers’ manipulation of reality countered at every stage by The Fury’s blind obsession and unstoppable nature.

Given that this is a standard Marvel UK comic, with the target market of teen boys, this climactic battle between Jaspers and The Fury was a mind-expanding thing, with Moore and Davis pushing ideas further and further out there, switching realities, shifting forms; switching from the moon to the deep ocean bed, the surface of the sun, and then onto even more unworldly vistas; a river of tar in a landscape of chromium, a plain of fused and cryptic flesh … all beautifully illustrated by Davis in unworldly vertical panels stretching the length of the page. It’s just 4 pages long, the final battle, but the skills of both writer and artist make it something epic, the reader forced to fill in the gaps, create the epic myth in their own mind.

Finally, at the end of the endgame, the heroes face the villain once more. Yet it’s not Captain Britain who gets to fulfil his destiny, who gets to save his world. Instead, it’s Captain UK, a character Moore has slowly, sympathetically, and perfectly developed through this run, this refugee from the world Jaspers and The Fury destroyed, who saves the day — all her rage, all her anger from losing her own world and all those she loved coming out in one final confrontation.

It’s over, it’s done. All the threats are vanquished, and all that’s left is the emotional coda of the final episode, ‘Funeral on Otherworld’. Moore’s last pages on Captain Britain, allowing him to wrap up every strand of the story — except for Arcade … we never did find out where that one was going to go.

The end of the Moore & Davis era, Captain Britain brings to a close one of the finest superhero epics, certainly one of the finest Marvel comics of my years of reading them. It had so much going on, from small-scale melodrama to multiverse-spanning action. That it ends on a bittersweet note, a first-and-last-kiss goodbye between Captains Britain and UK, seems somehow appropriate. That Captain UK has rarely been seen since then is a wonderful, if surprising, lack of character exploitation. From the earliest moments of Moore’s run, Linda McQuillan as Captain UK was a character that faced so much, but overcame it all. And I’d like to imagine her living her life as she wanted to, away from the madness that cost her so much, given another chance at happiness.

And that was it. The Moore/Davis team broke up as Moore left for other things — and rather great things they were too. Since taking up the reins of writing our favourite Captain in Marvel Superheroes 387, following the work of Thorpe, Moore and artist Davis had nurtured the character and created a truly fabulous superhero epic, one that featured a cast of incredible characters and, in Mad Jim Jaspers and The Fury, gave us two of the best comic villains there have ever been. Over the next couple of years, the Moore & Davis Captain Britain stories hopped from comic to comic, but never lost momentum, and when I look over Moore’s work, although I know Captain Britain is by no means his best, it’s still, nostalgia playing a part for sure, up there in my favourites of his; such was the impact it had on me. It’s definitely one of the greatest superhero sagas there’s ever been.

But Moore did leave, and the remaining three issues of MWOM saw Davis take the reins, writing and drawing. Fitting, really, as he’d been there right from the start of this new Captain Britain. Sure, he’d have assistance from first Steve Craddock and then Mike Collins, but make no mistake, those three MWOM strips are pure Davis. Three small vignettes, all bringing the Captain back to Earth, back to the smaller-scale things, but they’re all rather good in their own way, serving as a taster of what was to come and as a pleasant grounding of the strip after the epic adventures of the past.

Personally, I still think ‘Tea & Sympathy’ in MWOM issue 15 is one of Davis’ finest moments, crafting a very down-to-earth and personal tale that allows the Captain a moment to reflect and allows the reader time to catch up with all that’s gone on since the Jaspers Warp. Watching the stoic Captain relax and share a family’s grief over the loss of their son, due in part to the Captain’s actions in the previous issue, was a particularly satisfying thing, so far removed from all that’s gone before but showed us that Davis might well be the man to guide our Captain Britain for the future.

As it is, the three episodes here serve more as set-up for what’s to come: strange beings warping in, looking for Kaptain Britain, Betsy reunited with her brother, Megan joining the guests at Braddock Manor, all of it leading to a final page of Captain Britain in MWOM 16, Davis carrying on the Moore-thing of multiple teasers for the future, with the returns of both Slaymaster and The Crazy Gang, plus good old Inspector Dai Thomas finally putting two and two together when it came to Brian Braddock and Captain Britain.

But all this was to be in another comic, when we finally, in January 1985, got the Captain Britain comic we were all desperate for, as Captain Britain Monthly hit the shelves. Young 14-year-old me was incredibly excited to see it, and as a Marvel UK comic it really did try very hard to deliver some good UK strips, with Davis either collaborating with Jamie Delano or doing it all himself once more.

But here’s where I leave you in my month-long takeover of Art for Art’s Sake, as I’ve already covered Captain Britain Monthly in 2025 on the 40th anniversary of that one for A4AS # 300. And to repeat it here, well, that really would be an indulgence too far!

Still my favourite superhero, although I haven’t really followed his post-Marvel UK adventures all too closely, but I do keep an eye out on what’s happening, whether that’s Brian or Betsy Braddock, both of them taking up the mantle of Captain Britain over the years. Sure, I did pick up the Chris Claremont-written and Davis-drawn Excalibur for a while; the Paul Cornell-written Captain Britain and MI13 was pretty good, as I recall, but that was about it for me as far as regularly reading.

However, on the 50th anniversary, I think I will be taking a look at the latest Captain Britain comic: Captain Britain 50th Anniversary Special …

It comes out on 14th October, with three tales from the past, present, and future of the character, with both Brian and Betsy taking centre stage. Stories by Claremont and Paul Davidson, ‘Braddock Business’, ‘Another Day, An Otherworld’ by Dan Abnett and Kelsey Ramsay, and best of all, Davis returns to his character with ‘Chains of Command’.

And finally, just a few of the covers of the various collections I have on my shelves. The majority of them have the recoloured Captain Britain, starting with the X-Men Archives series. Personally, I still love the good old original black and white …