Captain Britain and MI:13 #5
Paul Cornell, writer
Pat Oliffe, artist
Marvel, September 2008
32 pages
$2.99
Hahahahahahaha! What a last page! I can’t remember the last time I was that tickled and delighted by the end of a superhero series’ monthly installment. Heck, the last time I laughed that hard at a comic, I was reading Tales Designed to Thrizzle. But this is a different kind of laugh, the kind you get from watching Doomsday or something like that–ah, I don’t want to spoil it. You should read it for yourself.
Which I suppose is what I want to say about the whole comic. Captain Britain & MI:13 has had an unusual life so far. It’s part of Marvel’s recent strategy of launching new ongoing series with story arcs that tie in with the event du jour. In this case, Captain Britain, the Black Knight, Spitfire, Pete Wisdom, John the Skrull and some other British heroes repelled a Skrull invasion of the U.K. designed to capture the magic of Avalon to use against humankind. It was a clever enough raison d’etre for a tie-in, reminiscent of the way The Incredible Hercules had a Secret Invasion tie-in arc about gods from Marvel’s various pantheons waging war against the Skrull’s own deities, but since this was the first glimpse anyone had at the series it was tough to figure out how it would feel when removed from that event-comic “everybody against overwhelming evil for all the marbles” feel. I figured I’d take a look at this issue, the first one outside the SI umbrella, think to myself “eh, well done for what it is, but not for me,” and be on my way.
Chances are I’ll be sticking around. Writer Paul Cornell is taking a pre-existing, already appealing batch of characters and concepts and putting them together in a solid team concept: a melange of gaudy, famous superheroes, secret Captain America-style black ops guys, and enthusiastic civilian-adventurers are employed to keep the United Kingdom safe from evil supernatural entities freed during the Skrull invasion. Now that I think of it, it’s a bit like the full-of-promise Breakout arc of New Avengers, where a varied group of superheroes formed an ad hoc team dedicated to tracking down supercriminals freed during a raid on a supermax prison, and finding whoever was responsible for the breakout. That very quickly got sidetracked by storyarcs explaining who each of the more obscure team members actually were, but it was a swell idea, and hopefully here we’ll see it put into practice.
But more than just the nuts and bolts basics of the superconcepts involved (which I’ll admit are a big part of it–heck, a part of me thought that even if it was a bad book I’d stick around just to see if and when Union Jack joined the team), Cornell has imbued it with lively, entertaining dialogue, particularly from the sensational character find of the comic, Faisa Hussain. This accidental superheroine–a motormouthed, starstruck, Excalibur-wielding, (oh yeah) Muslim doctor who gained healing powers from a Skrull contraption–is just a cool code name away from being the most unique, and well-realized, new Marvel hero since the Runaways. (Although I guess none of the Runaways’ codenames ever really stuck. Oh well.) It’s the kind of writing capable of making the arrival of Blade (British-born, you know) actually seem like a big honking deal. Which leads us to that last page…hahahahahahahahaha!
Earlier in the ’00s, many of the best superhero comics self-consciously dealt with self-conscious second-string superheroes and supervillains. While the marquee characters were still tied up with fairly old-school superheroics, writers from Brian Michael Bendis to Peter Milligan examined what it might be like to be an extraordinary being who, for whatever reason, wasn’t seen as being all that extraordinary by the people of their world. It was an extremely meta idea–after all, it was real-world fans who decided that Spider-Man was a superstar, and the fiction just twisted to reflect that. Eventually it became a reflexive tic of writers to have any characters who weren’t members of the Justice League, the Avengers, or the Uncanny X-Men describe themselves as D-listers, and whatever point was being made about celebrity or identity was lost. These days, the most rewarding superhero titles that star characters who aren’t on the short list for movie treatment–The Incredible Hercules, The Immortal Iron Fist, Agents of Atlas, Captain Britain–don’t comment on that fact, they take advantage of it, using these characters’ remove from the Big Events and megateams to carve out their own way of doing superhero comics: incorporating other genres, expanding their mythologies, giving the characters a different goal, adopting a different tone than the current “Lost riff and/or summer popcorn movie” options have to offer. As seen here, it’s an engaging, successful strategy.
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