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CAPTAIN BRITAIN trade paperback
Recommended (8/10)
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Marvel Comics
Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Alan Davis
Colors: Digital Chameleon
Letters: Jenny O'Connor, John Aldrich & Steve Craddock
Original editor: Bernie Jaye
Price: $19.95 US/$29.95 CAN |
This collection of Captain Britain is not some of Alan Moore's or Alan Davis's best work. But it is good work. One gets the impression that Moore had so many mad and wonderful ideas that they just poured out onto the page like a spilled bottle of ink. And it was a treat to see the early evolution of an artist of Davis's calibre. These are weird, goofy and even chilling stories that will have new readers clamoring for new Captain Britain adventures from both co-creators.
After a near-death experience on an alternate Earth, Captain Britiain returns home and reunites with his twin sister, whose precognitive powers have grown in the time they were apart. Together, they harbor interdimensional merceranies and dictators in their home, fight the madness of the reality warping politician named Jim Jaspers and face the uncaring, cold power of the Fury.
Some of my comments in this review strike me as redundant, because I've read Alan Moore's introduction in this volume. Understandably, he focuses primarily on Davis's contribution, and he accurately points out that one witnesses the evolution of a budding comics artist over the course of these stories. Davis starts out with a gritty style that suits the stark tone of Captain Britain's first encounter with the Fury, and it gains polish as the stories and time go on. There are some wonderful and weird character designs on display here, and Davis combines an organic look with a sterile sense of technology in the Fury.
Digital Chameleon's recoloring job is quite sharp, reinforcing the imaginative and magical tone of various plot elements. Moore and Davis's ideas and visions were definitely ahead of their time, and computer-coloring technology has finally caught up with them. The only real visual problem was the scratchy, inconsistent and occasionally hard-to-read lettering found in the first few stories. Mind you, I realize that it's entirely fair to judge work from yesteryear by today's standards. It's a little distracting, but when Craddock takes over later in the book, it's not a concern at all.
 This isn't the first Captain Britain trade paperback that Marvel has released. In the late 1980s, coinciding with the release of Chris Claremont and Davis's Excalibur series, Marvel published a trade of stories -- written by Davis and Jamie Delano, illustrated by Davis as well -- that actually occur right after the events of this new collection. I picked it up, and though those stories were more focused and effective, it's easy to see how the seeds planted by Alan Moore evolved to that point. Those later tales owed a great deal to the foundation laid out in this volume.
In 1984, director James Cameron and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger created a movie icon in the form of a robotic assassin that felt no emotion or pain, that never deviated from its lethal mission, that never gave up. It's that quality that made The Terminator such a huge success, but Alan Moore beat Cameron and co-writer Gale Anne hurd to the punch when he created the Fury a few years earlier. In the Fury, Moore captured the chilling determination of a killing machine, and he did so without benefit of makeup effects, animatronics or a haunting soundtrack. The Fury stands out as the most powerful storytelling element in this book... one so powerful that its influence was felt in those later stories in that now-out-of-print collection.
As Moore explains in the introduction, his CB writing stint as represented in this book started off with the need to wrap up from loose ends from previous stories. So the reader finds himself in the middle of the action as the book begins. Fortunately, Moore offers up a thoroughly accessible script, just as Davis and Delano did with the other Captain Britain trade.
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