Nigel Kitching & others - The Light Brigade (1990)

 

This may seem a bit of a stretch as reviews go - not even a stack of comic books, but a strip featured in an anthology title which was dead in the water by the eighth issue; so The Light Brigade was never finished, which is a shame.

The Light Brigade first appeared in the late and much missed Martin Skidmore's Trident - a bi-monthly which lasted a little over a year - and was arguably the lead strip given its featuring on three of the eight covers, notably those drawn by both John Ridgeway and Alan Davis. Eddie Campbell's superb Bacchus has obviously done much better in the long run, but The Light Brigade, co-created with Neil Gaiman - although his involvement was limited to the first instalment - felt like the potential hit single.

It's a cyberpunk comic strip hitting all of the points you would expect to find in a cyberpunk comic strip, but dating from 1989 - way before the rise of the internet. It wasn't the first, didn't do anything which hadn't already been done in a William Gibson novel, and in the wake of the movie Tron, I've no doubt everyone from the X-Men to Biffo the Bear had toppled some virtual corporate edifice in cyberspace by this point; but The Light Brigade nevertheless feels early, like the first expression of something new, as was, without quite having dated in the usual way. The story, such as it is, tells of four individuals, underwhelming urban nobodies in real life, waging a VR war as magically punky pirates; and it would probably be bollocks were it not for Nigel Kitching.

I gather Kitching went on to international renown as artist on the Sonic the Hedgehog comic book - which seems, by the way, a peculiarly logical development; but back in 1989 he was drawing this, Mark Millar's Saviour, and not much else that I'm aware of. His art tended to the starkly angular and expressionist while conveying a lightness of touch equal, I would argue, to that of Eddie Campbell elsewhere in the mag. We get a few fill-in episodes from adjacent artists, Nigel Dobbyn, D'Israeli and so on, each of which squares so beautifully with the whole as to come and go without the usual sense of disruption or looming deadlines. So I guess it's all down to Kitching's writing, which is well paced, erudite without waffling, and prone to sparking off new and delightfully wacky ideas above and beyond anything you would expect of punky pirates fighting Richard Branson in cyberspace. It was at least as good as anything in 2000AD that year.

Unfortunately, excepting Bacchus, it was significantly better than the rest of Trident for the most part -  a black and white newsprint anthology which never quite found its identity and was neither 2000AD, Deadline, nor the small press. It had its moments - notably a couple of strips by Denny Derbyshire - but was firing off in too many directions with too many weak links - not least being the terrible art of Lowlife. Thus did Trident fall from the edge after just one year, going the way of most attempts to sell not-quite-mainstream comic books to the English. I don't suppose The Light Brigade will ever be finished, but it should be remembered at least.

Captain Britain: Birth of a Legend

Chris Claremont, Gary Friedrich, Herb Trimpe & others
Captain Britain: Birth of a Legend (2011)

While I've very much been a fan of the Alan Davis version of the character, I've remained largely ignorant of his previous incarnation. I just about remember seeing the Captain Britain weekly advertised on the telly back in 1976, specifically the first issue which came with a free mask which was actually just half of a union jack printed on a bit of cardboard with holes for eyes. Even at the age of eleven I had difficulty seeing the appeal. I'm not sure I ever actually saw an issue of the comic. Something about the enterprise struck me as trying too hard and there was something a bit unpleasant about that weird mask which covered the lower half of his face.

As you probably know, Captain Britain was born when Marvel had the big idea of giving us blokes of Englishland a character of very our own, as distinct from black and white reprints of their American comics. Chris Claremont had been born in London and grew up in the US reading imported issues of Eagle, and Herb Trimpe was apparently living in Cornwall, so I guess that seemed close enough at the time. The problem with it is that, much as I suspected, it was trying too hard.

Firstly, everything was nevertheless done in New York - according to Wikipedia - meaning the deadlines were apparently cunty, and keeping in mind this was a weekly comic produced by a company more accustomed to monthlies with different members of the creative team on different continents and the internet not yet invented; and English comic book publishing tradition necessitated stories told in instalments of seven pages at a time. It's probably a minor miracle that it's not a complete heap of crap.

While I'm sure Captain Britain may have worked as a weekly, at least for a time, these seven-page punch-ups were never intended to be read in a single sitting. The narrative is unusually compressed even by the standards of seventies Marvel, and the action is almost continuous which becomes quickly exhausting. There's even a self-conscious jokey editor's note about it somewhere around issue twenty, by which point the whole thing has begun to feel a little like Dave Smith's Captain Captured from Viz #18 and I had trouble recalling whether our boy had actually taken a five-minute breather since Merlin turned him into a stripier Captain America on that fated night back in the first pulse-pounding issue.

In addition to this, a certain degree of Britface is probably inevitable given the creative team being torn as they were between delivering something recognisably in the Marvel superhero tradition whilst identifiably belonging to the country in which it was published, and hopefully without just being Spiderman with the references switched. Perhaps inevitably, it tries too hard and simply comes across as a bit weird with Britspeak delivered with an ostentatious flourish every few panels. Everyone is either a bloke or a bird and they all read the Times, even the bloomin' cabbies, and references to the pub and something called soccer come faster than a speeding lorry! Cops think about how they're not allowed to have guns during bank robberies. The battle with the Nazi-revivalist Red Skull goes on for what feels like a million issues and begins to suggest maybe someone back at the bullpen noticed all those British war comics and figured it might be one way of tapping into the market, and Red Skull quite naturally kidnaps the Prime Minister - apparently Jim Callaghan, but with a touch of Wilson and even Heath from certain angles; and of course the Queen makes a showing, having been hypnotised by the Manipulator who wants her to lead the Royal Navy into battle against the small African nation from which he was recently deposed. I mean it's nice that Marvel wanted to do something for its loyal British readers, and it is at least sincere, thus avoiding the smug cynicism of Austin Powers and the like, but it's fucking hard to read this stuff if you're actually from England and older than ten.

The actual stories are so ropey that it's weird, which is probably what saves the thing. Captain Britain's battle with Lord Hawk, for one example, makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Professor Scott was some friend of the family, a teacher who jacked it in due to students taking the piss out his Catweazle-esque appearance and outmoded views. His one pleasure was falconry except, as we all know, all of the hawks in England have been killed off by pollution - every last one. Brian - that being Captain Britain's secret identity - designs and builds Scott a radio-controlled robot hawk in the hope of cheering him up. Scott instead goes mental and roams the country as Lord Hawk somehow using his normal-sized radio-controlled bird to destroy power stations and other polluting bastions of modernity.

'The air will once more be pure as it was in the past,' he tells his radio-controlled bird in one panel with a villainous leer on his face, 'in the glorious days of knighthood and ladies fair when noble birds like yourself filled the skies and hunted without choking on polluted air!' He may as well be talking to a model aircraft.

Anyway, this frankly confused senior citizen and operator of what may as well be a model aircraft takes on Captain Britain, the man who designed and built the thing which may as well be a model aircraft, and which was originally a present given in the hope that it might cheer the ungrateful fucker up a bit; and somehow Lord Hawk is enough of a match for Captain Britain for the whole thing to last five issues. More than anything, the comic feels like a distended version of one of the ludicrous superhero strips in Viz, back when it was funny, which is ultimately why it remains readable. It's mostly fucking stupid, but the art is generally decent - members of the royal family notwithstanding - and it's doing everything it can to keep you entertained because it really, really, really wants you to like it. It's not difficult to see why 2000AD blew it out of the water about six months into its initial run, but this first, undeniably shaky version of Captain Britain is nevertheless worth remembering and is not without its own non-ironic charm.

 

 

Captain Britain

Alan Moore & Alan Davis Captain Britain (1984)
I didn't even realise this had been collected until I saw it tucked away on a shelf, and I hadn't considered that it even would have been collected due to Alan Moore's habit of wishing cancer and AIDS unto ten generations upon those who doth reprint the stuff he wrote before he became an actual wizard and acquired all sorts of dark and mysterious powers by which he might smite his enemies; in fact he even wrote an introduction to this 2001 collection, words amounting to gosh, I'd forgotten about this old thing. What larks!

I'd actually read most of this, I think, at one point or another, but I can't remember where so it's nevertheless nice to have it back. Captain Britain, as we all know, was Marvel's attempt to infiltrate the land of fog, mist and Bash Street Kids on something approximating its own terms, because Chris Claremont had been on holiday to Englishland when he was a kid or summink. Then Alan Moore took it over and tried to make it more interesting. I can't be arsed to check the chronology, but if this predates the stuff he wrote for Warrior, then it can't have been by much, because you can really tell that he's learning on the job for the first couple of instalments with half a ton of florid and quite unnecessary wordage crammed into each panel. It reads as though it lacks confidence, but even stranger is that the art of Alan Davis seems to be similarly in the process of finding its feet. In fact, such are the first couple of episodes that they feel strangely like a continuation of The Stars My Degradation from Sounds but without the knob gags.

Needless to say, Captain Britain isn't the greatest work by any of those involved, but it's decent, imaginative, a lot of fun, and curiously prescient of what was to come in certain respects.

The Complete D.R. & Quinch

Alan Moore, Alan Davis & Jamie Delano
The Complete D.R. & Quinch (1987)
Moore apparently disowns this one as having lacked any redeeming social values, which is a shame, and I know at least one person who regards it as the only decent thing the man ever wrote. D.R. & Quinch of course appeared in the pages of 2000AD about a million years ago. It's basically an underground comic very much revealing Moore's roots and would have been equally at home in the pages of Commies from Mars, and as such I'd suggest it actually is a big deal that Moore managed to sell it to the Mighty Tharg in the first place, so he does himself something of a disservice and his subsequent judgement regarding redeeming social values seems to have come from the same place which inspired that bewilderingly nihilistic take on seventies punk culture in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which appeared to owe more to Kenny Everett's Sid Snot routines than anything which actually happened.

The lack of redeeming social values is surely the point, because there's a certain age at which it's both healthy and educational to piss off one's parents; and thus we have a science-fiction rewrite of characters from National Lampoon's Animal House in a spirit distantly descended from that of Whizz for Atomms by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle; because mindless destruction can be funny, and sometimes it should be celebrated; or if you don't understand it, bust it, as my friend Carl once explained to me.

Of course, it might be argued that such rampant nihilism worked better against the backdrop of the wipe-clean pastel-toned eighties than it does now, with reactionary trends having reclassified popular support for the worst sort of authoritarian eugenicist as a somehow daring and even revolutionary position - because God forbid that anyone should have their lives quite literally destroyed by political correctness; but if we're going to let certain fuckwits claim that Hitler was simply of his time, then I don't see any good reason to dismiss D.R. & Quinch, who were for a short while the epitomy of rock 'n' fuckin' roll, man.

Technically, the writing is kind of loose and sloppy, closer in spirit to Roscoe Moscow than Watchmen - not so much stories as a series of gags with raspberries blown in the general direction of everything else, which I personally see as joyous rather than cynical or necessarily nihilistic; but it doesn't matter because the gags are funny, and are still funny thirty years later, and the art of Alan Davis is gorgeous, and D.R. & Quinch is easily as much his work as Moore's; and you know, I still can't watch The Godfather or Apocalypse Now without a little voice in the back of my head whispering mind the oranges, Marlon.

For fuck's sake, Alan - get a grip: be proud!