Last War in Albion

This is the tenth and final part of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Three months later, Marvel UK relaunched Captain Britain as a comic in its own right, with the idea being that the comic would also get US distribution and feature exclusively UK-created material. In practice this meant that Captain Britain was accompanied by a reprint of Steve Moore’s Abslom Daak strips from Doctor Who Weekly, a reprint of the first Night Raven strip from Hulk Comic, and a strip featuring the Free-Fall Warriors, obscure backing characters from a Doctor Who Monthly strip written by Steve Parkhouse.

Figure 369: Alan Davis revisits a famous panel. (Written by Jamie Delano, in Captain Britain #2, 1985)

This time around Captain Britain was written, on Moore’s recommendation, by Jamie Delano, who had impressed writing the Night Raven text pieces after Moore gave them up. Delano’s run faces the exact problem one would expect following Moore’s, which is that there’s not a lot to work with besides bringing back Moore’s own concepts. Sure enough the Crazy Gang appears, as set up by Davis, allowing Davis to recycle his best panel from Marvel Super-Heroes #377, followed by a version of the Special Executive from a hundred years earlier than the original called Gatecrasher’s Technet. By Davis’s account, it was not an especially happy collaboration – Davis described Delano’s scripts as “dark, strange, cerebral,” tales that “didn’t fit in the super hero genre,” and claims that he “was the senior partner, initially supplying plots and long story, then mutilating and reworking Jamie’s scripts,” which led to Delano departing the title after only thirteen issues. Davis, by this time, had found work in the US and was largely uninterested in continuing to work for Marvel UK wages anyway, leading to the demise of the series after its fourteenth issue, a conclusion written and drawn by Davis. After that the character reverted to the American superhero he always in reality was, making a couple of appearances in Claremont-penned X-Men annuals and a suitably dreadful two issue appearance in Captain America before Claremont and Davis used him along with some X-Men castoffs to create Excalibur, a supposedly British superhero team that was written and published in the United States and consisted 80% of characters created by Americans, a move that essentially brought the character full circle a decade after his creation.

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This is the ninth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

On October 21^st, Moore attended a Comics Mart in Glasgow. An account of this trip is printed in Mighty World of Marvel #9 under the title “I Belong to Glasgow,” alongside the Captain Britain strip “Among These Dark Satanic Mills,” a title that quotes Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” about attempting to build Jerusalem (by then imagined as Liberty, the emanation of the giant progenitor of all humanity Albion) within England via a mental war of creative effort. There he met a twenty-three year old comics fan and sometime writer named Grant Morrison.

Figure 363: Grant Morrison’s last comic work prior to his 1983 meeting with Alan Moore was an issue of Starblazer illustrated by José Ortiz. (From Starblazer #86, 1982)

After a promising beginning writing and drawing avant garde stories in the new wave science fiction style and a superhero strip for his local paper, as well as a couple of stories in the space action digest Starblazer, Morrison had not published a comic in a year, and was at the time more interested in a music career, but was also active in the fanzine scene, and gave Moore a copy of his fanzine Bombs Away Batman, which contained both some positive reviews of Moore’s comics work and an interview with Morrison’s band, The Mixers, in which Morrison asserts Aleister Crowley as one of his influences while one of his bandmates cites Jerry Cornelius.

Moore’s account of the event in “I Belong To Glasgow” is primarily a glowingly comedic take in which he goes on for several paragraphs suggesting that he was only at the event because he was bribed and making fairly generic if well-executed jokes at the expense the Scottish (“While incest, murder and cannibalism have been outlawed for centuries in our own land, in Scotland they are still very much a part of everyday family life”) before settling into the meat of the piece in which he praises “the level of friendliness that we encountered,” a paragraph about Bob Napier’s AKA fanzine, and the declaration that “we had an incredible time” in Glasgow.

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This is the eighth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

In this regard it is perhaps easiest to think of The Daredevils as Marvel UK’s conscious response to Dez Skinn’s success with Warrior. While Warrior was always a mess in terms of its finances, the buzz and attention it drew turned plenty of heads. The problem was that Warrior made its name off of original content, whereas Marvel UK was still first and foremost a company that existed to publish reprints of American comic books. And so for all that The Daredevils was Marvel’s attempt to create a magazine for adult comic fans who liked Warrior, it had to do so without actually having the budget to publish original British material like Warrior. All it could afford for original comics content was Moore and Davis’s Captain Britain strip.

Figure 354: Two of Alan Davis’s major characters on the cover of Arkensword, a major UK fanzine.

And so it focused on its non-comics text pieces, taking a cue from the fanzine culture that existed within the UK. Fanzines – a portmanteau of “fan” and “magazine” – are fan produced publications discussing popular media, often though not always within the broad auspices of “geek culture,” with comics being a particularly common focus, although fanzines focusing on all sorts of popular culture exist. Ostensibly distributed at cost with no profit being involved, fanzines were typically distributed either by mail order or at conventions, and proved a training ground for numerous creators: Dez Skinn, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, and Grant Morrison all did work for or on fanzines early in their career. Featuring a mix of original cartoons, fan fiction, interviews, historical features, reviews, criticism, and outright whimsy, fanzine culture was at once vibrant and strange.

Figure 355: Brother Power the Geek, written and drawn by Joe Simon, lasted only two issues.

And, perhaps more to the point, was something The Daredevils actively kept track of with its Fanzine Reviews column. Indeed, that column gives a sense of the broad inventiveness of fanzines as it describes their contents: interviews with war comic artist Joe Colquhoun and Kevin O’Neill, fan fiction, reviews of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, comics by Eddie Campbell, a retrospective on Steve Ditko’s Hawk and Dove comic for DC, trivia quizzes,  satirical comics about Doctor Who, an episode guide to the 1960s Batman series, a compendium of ludicrous dialogue from the same series, an article on DC’s 1968 Brother Power the Geek (‘one oft he most brain-blisteringly awful comic books ever produced by human beings,” Moore explains), reprints of iconically dumb comic book panels,  a review of Zippy the Pinhead, a cover by Bryan Talbot, and a one page strip by Savage Pencil are all specific features mentioned among the reviews of dozens of fanzines.

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This is the seventh of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Figure 347: Wardog and Zeitgeist, of the Special Executive, made their first appearance in an early Moore strip for Doctor Who Monthly (From “Black Sun Rising,” written by Alan Moore, art by David Lloyd, in Doctor Who Monthly #57, 1981)

This, however, is just an extreme case of a tendency that Moore displays throughout his Captain Britain run. It is not that he doesn’t introduce new characters. But all of them are clear extensions of characters that predated his run. The Fury is a solid enough villain, but he’s also created to explain where the superheroes of the alternate earth went. Captain UK, one of those superheroes, was mentioned in passing by Dave Thorpe back in Marvel Super-Heroes #379, and her husband, Miracleman, is a barely veiled Marvelman. Vixen herself may be an original character, but Vixen’s gang appeared all the way back in Captain Britain #3. Even the Special Executive are borrowed from Moore’s earlier Doctor Who work. Moore’s Captain Britain is populated entirely out of the existing comic book world of Captain Britain. In this regard, Moore manages to largely sidestep the question of what Britain is. Britain isn’t even depicted in this comic – certainly it takes several steps backwards from the overt political content of the Thorpe era. The Britain of which Braddock is Captain is, in other words, firmly a comic book realm and not a real one. As Moore puts it, “he’s pure Marvel! He’s there in the Marvel Universe with a billion other super characters all around him. You can’t get that same realism.”

In many ways, then, Alan Davis’s account of things is correct in the broad strokes, but incomplete. Moore ramps down the politics and up the cosmic weirdness, yes, but only as part of ramping up the general superheroishness of the strip. In this regard he is closer to Thorpe’s approach than he lets on: where Thorpe attempted to ramp up both politics and his “peculiarly British surrealty,” Moore opts only for the latter. It is tempting to accuse this approach of being apolitical – a dangerous accusation when dealing with an intrinsically nationalist symbol like Captain Britain.

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The Kickstarter to fund continued production of The Last War in Albion ends Saturday. It is currently $69 away from funding Volume 5 of the project.

This is the sixth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

The year before he finished adding Songs of Experience to Songs of Innocence Blake published two further works using the word “Albion.” First was America a Prophecy, which was followed up in 1794 by Europe a Prophecy. These “continental prophecies” adapted and repurposed American and European history to talk about revolution in a more absolute sense, exploring Blake’s character of Orc, the furious spirit of revolution who is both the eldest son of Los and Enitharmon and the fallen form of Luvah. In these poems Albion is simply used to describe Britain. While Albion has princes, angels, and guardians, and while it is described at one point as growing sick, it is nevertheless clearly a land possessing a shore and cliffs.

Figure 340: “Albion Rose,” by William Blake, from A Large Book of Designs, 1796.

But in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, also published in 1793, Blake sets up a different relationship. Albion itself does not appear in the poem, which would gesture towards reading Albion as simply a metonym of Britain, with the daughters not being biological offspring so much as British women in general. But the fact that the main character of the poem, Oothoon, is explicitly described as “the soft soul of America” suggests at least some measure of personification, a viewpoint that Blake confirms – while making clear that Visions of the Daughters of Albion is, in his view, an “early, minor work” characterized by his being “too timid to say what he means” while simultaneously “not meaning much of anything anyway,” he admits that Albion is “not entirely passive” within the prophecy. This would suggest that his daughters – whose only real role in the poem is to serve as witnesses to the story of Oothoon – fail to do ever more than “hear her woes, and echo back her sighs” not because of a rejection of Oothoon (who transforms over the course of the poem from traumatized rape victim to a triumphant advocate of freedom who calls for people to “arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy!

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In an effort to keep momentum in the final week of the Kickstarter, I have compressed the stretch goal schedule. Volume 4, on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, is now unlocked at $7000, which, at the time of writing this, we’re only $53 away from. Volume 5 is now at $8000, Volume 6 at $9000, and so on. Thrice weekly posting of Torchwood: Miracle Day is still at $8000. Also, there are two new rewards offering James Taylor’s the original art from the Kickstarter banner. 

This is the fifth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Figure 334: Alan Davis’s first page of Marvelman art featured a reworking of Garry Leach’s iconic panel. (See Figure 326. Written by Alan Moore. From “The Yesterday Gambit,” in Warrior Summer Special, 1982)

Some ambiguity exists over how exactly Alan Moore was hired. Jaye suggests that Paul Neary and Alan Davis each independently vouched for Moore, but in Davis’s telling he only “had met Alan a week or so earlier, when Des [sic] Skinn asked me to help Garry Leach on the Marvelman art.” Dez Skinn remembers things in the exact opposite order, claiming that Moore suggested Davis as Leach’s replacement on Marvelman, much to Skinn’s consternation, as he thought that “there are only two super-heroes strips in one country of 55 million people. You can’t have the same pair of guys doing both.” Moore, for his part, openly admits to not remembering the order of events. Any of these orders are possible, ultimately – Davis’s first Marvelman art appeared in the Warrior Summer Special for 1982, and he took over the art full time in October. Moore’s first Captain Britain came out in between the two, in July. 

Regardless of how he got the job, however, it’s important to note that Moore’s work on Marvelman predates his Captain Britain work. His basic approach in both comics is, after all, the same – a swift reconceptualization of the character created by examining and cherry picking aspects from a chaotic and only hazily remembered past. With Marvelman, however, Moore had the marked advantage of starting his story with a more or less blank slate.

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The Kickstarter to fund The Last War in Albion is just $1500 away from committing the blog to running through Volume 4 of the project, focusing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Also, Last War in Albion will be running on Thursdays for this and the next two installments. 

This is the fourth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Figure 327: Alan Davis’s first published comics page features a memorable Z-shaped panel layout as Captain Britain and Jackdaw travel from dimension to dimension. (From Marvel Super-Heroes #377, 1981. Click to enlarge.)

Meanwhile, during the nine months in which Warrior was under development, Marvel had decided to try again with Captain Britain, picking up where Steve Parkhouse had left the character in his Black Knight serial, namely being sent back to Earth accompanied by the elf Jackdaw. Helming the strip were a pair of fresh faces – Dave Thorpe, who had mulled around Marvel UK’s editorial staff for a year and change waiting for a writing gig to open, and Alan Davis, making his artistic debut. Like many British comics creators of the time, Davis was a part-timer who came to comics as a second job, in Davis’s case alongside driving forklifts for a warehouse. Famously, Davis was unaware that comics pages were typically drawn on oversized sheets and shrunk down for reproduction and so drew the art for his first issue at print size, resulting in there not being enough room for the dialogue and in the strip having to be printed in six pages instead of the intended five. 

Nevertheless, Davis’s style is recognizable and distinctive from the start. with the cartooning influence that would characterize his later D.R. & Quinch work already in evidence. He’s immediately adept at character design, managing to introduce the strip’s villains, Mad Jim Jaspers’s Crazy Gang, in crisp detail. He shows an immediate aptitude for drawing expressive faces and particularly fluid action – in his first page he manages a visual gag in which Captain Britain and Jackdaw land on what appears to be Earth, with Jackdaw, who lays back as though reclining, crashing onto the ground while Captain Britain lands in a dynamic pose, already prepared to fight. 

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