chapter seven

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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The Kickstarter to fund The Last War in Albion has made it to its first stretch goal! Next up is a commitment to blogging through Volume 4 of the project, focusing on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

This is the second 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. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The 1976 launch of Captain Britain, Marvel’s first comic created for exclusive UK release, was filled with a lot of fanfare, but under the hood the fact that it was blatantly created by Americans was altogether obvious…

The fact that only sixteen issues into his own series Captain Britain not only needed to be propped up with a high profile guest star, but had to be propped up by the exact character he was demonstrably designed as an imitation of speaks volumes about the problems the series was facing. And these problems can hardly be called a surprise – of course a series with a hook of “Britain’s very own superhero” is going to be lackluster when it’s produced by a bunch of Americans with a minimal-at-best connection with Britain. At least Claremont was born in the UK, even if he moved away too young to have any meaningful memories of it – but Herb Trimpe’s UK bona fides consisted of having vacationed there once, an experience that seems to have mostly left him with the view that he “didn’t believe that a superhero could be popular in England.” But as tenuous as the initial creative team’s connection to the UK was, Friedrich’s arrival marked the point where the series became a revolving door of creators with no connection whatsoever – Trimpe left after issue #23, with John Buscema, a longstanding artist most associated with The Avengers, drawing seven issues before being replaced by Ron Wilson, around which point writing duties became a complete mess. Issue #36 was plotted by Friedrich but had dialogue entirely written by Larry Lieber, issue #37 was scripted by Len Wein, with Larry Lieber joining Bob Budiansky for plotting duties, and issues #38 and 39 were plotted by Bob Budiansky with dialogue by Jim Lawrence. By this point the comic had long since deteriorated to where it was no longer profitable to print it in color, and with issue #39 it was cancelled entirely and, in the usual Marvel UK way, merged with another title, in this case the newly reminted Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain.…

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Hello everyone. I’m currently running a Kickstarter to help fund the continuation of The Last War in Albion. Right now we’re funded through Book Two, which will focus on Watchmen, and are well on our way to the first stretch goal, which will guarantee Book Three. Please consider contributing to help this blog keep going and this blogger keep eating food.

This is the second 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.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Marvel Comics traces its origins back to 1939, but in its modern incarnation dates to 1961 when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created The Fantastic Four and a string of further hits. By the 1970s, however, Marvel had largely moved on to its second generation of talent.

Figure 313: As was the norm for debuts of British comics, the first issue of The Mighty World of Marvel featured a free and thoroughly lame gift.

As part of this corporate expansion, Marvel decided to look into foreign markets, specifically the United Kingdom. Short of Odhams’ Power Comics line that gave Steve Moore his comics industry breakthrough, Marvel comics had no official UK distribution, famously arriving as ballast on ships that was then sold off in an entirely unlicensed and functionally unregulated market that made following individual series difficult. In 1972, three years after Odhams was absorbed by IPC and dropped the Marvel license, Marvel decided to take matters into their own hands by creating a UK-based publisher that would distribute Marvel work for the UK comics market. Recognizing that the British and American comics markets were fundamentally different media, with the UK dominated by weekly black and white anthologies as opposed to the monthly color comics featuring a single story of the US market, Marvel UK kicked off its line at the end of September with The Mighty World of Marvel, an anthology that initially featured Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the Hulk. Five months later they added Spider-Man Comics Weekly to the line-up, bringing Thor and Iron Man to the UK market as well. 

The initial model of Marvel UK was straightforward – comics were printed in Europe, but were edited in New York alongside Marvel’s other fare. They consisted of black and white reprints of Marvel material, with stories that filled a single US monthly issue getting cut up over multiple UK weekly installments.

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This is the first of an unknown number of parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. The omnibus for this chapter is not quite ready yet, and I’ll post it next week.

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.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore and Alan Davis had a vibrant and popular creative partnership in 2000 AD on the D.R. & Quinch strips, but the roots of their collaboration go back to 1982 and their work together for Marvel UK…

Figure 307: Uncanny Tales, one of the many pulp magazines published by Martin Goodman.

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