A Country That Instinctively Hates The Foreign (The Last War in Albion Part 44: Dave Thorpe's Captain Britain)

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. 

This is a common element of Davis’s work - he draws less ostentatiously muscular heroes than many artists, and instead focuses on drawing the whole figure, thinking clearly about the overall shape of the body. Moore, in one interview, describes watching Davis doing character design, recalling him thinking about her on an anatomical level, concluding that “she’ll have a build like some of those older Russian athletes, and that means that her torso is pushed up and the rib-cage is really thick, and there’ll be a little extra muscle there, and that means she’ll probably stand like this,” characterizing this as Davis getting to the point where “he was inside the character from the bone outwards” such that he drew “the character inside out.” 

This skill at character design was put to immediate work by Marvel, who made a redesign of Captain Britain’s costume one of Davis’s first priorities. As Davis drolly puts it, the costume redesign was “generally accepted as a priority by everyone at Marvel UK, if not all of British fandom,” as the lion rampant that formed Captain Britain’s original insignia was primarily associated with an ad campaign for the Egg Marketing Board designed by author Fay Weldon, which led to Captain Britain being the subject of a number of terrible puns involving eggs. More broadly, Davis complained that the costume was “a pastiche of costume cliches, with a lion rampant and flag thrown in for cultural relevance.” Davis, for his part, began the design from the perspective of military regalia, basing it on the Horse Guards of Buckingham Palace, only with a coat and helmet modeled off of the Union Jack. 

Thorpe, meanwhile, was a longtime comics fan who had written into Captain Britain back in 1977, a letter which appeared in issue #17. In it, Thorpe at least partially tipped his hand about where he intended to go with the character, complaining that Captain Britain was overly formulaic, but also noting the banality inherent in the idea and suggesting that the character be shown to be “thinking about what it means to be a ‘Captain Britain,’” paralleling this with the way in which Captain America was handled in US comics. (Captain America had recently gone through a storyline in which, his faith in America shaken by the Marvel equivalent of Watergate, he abandoned the name Captain America and instead became Nomad for several issues before resuming the name Captain America having decided that his duty is to face “any and all threats to the American dream,” and that this dream, not the government, is where his loyalties lie.)

Thorpe’s letter gives a reasonably strong sense of where he would end up going with the comic. Thorpe was adamant in writing the comic that “nationalism had to be avoided,” and viewed Captain Britain as “a muscle-bound upper class twit with a brain the size of a pea draped in a Union Jack,” both views that are clearly anticipated in his view four years earlier that the idea of a Captain Britain was fundamentally flawed. In a particularly damning claim, he noted that Captain Britain had to be starkly different from Captain America, claiming that “Americans are generally prepared to be much more nationalistic than us and use their flag patriotically. over here only fascists do that with the Union Jack,” a viewpoint that seemingly puts him at odds with his artist’s ideas in redesigning Captain Britain’s costume. And, in a view that would come back to haunt him in a big way, he expressed in his letter that “the intriguing questions I keep asking myself are ‘where would Captain Britain stand on the Northern Ireland question?’.” 

But it would be a mistake to characterize Thorpe’s take on Captain Britain as being exclusively defined by the political. Thorpe’s background included a degree studying Dada and Surrealism, and his attempt to make the character something other than an off-brand Captain America were, in his words, based on the “British surreality” of “Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, HG Wells, John Wyndham, and Doctor Who.” This connected well with editor Paul Neary’s idea to put Captain Britain in an alternate universe Britain. Thorpe developed a supporting cast, starting with the editorially imposed Jackdaw, who was set as a comedic sidekick. He introduced a set of villains in his first installment: Mad Jim Jaspers and his Crazy Gang, and subsequently introduced Saturnyne, a mysterious figure from another dimension. But alongside this cosmic weirdness and surreal kick was an ever-present political theme. The first real clue that Captain Britain has landed on an alternate world is the revelation that the British National Party (an extreme right-wing party that was what Thorpe was clearly referring to when he talked about fascists draping themselves in the Union Jack) now run Britain, and the monarch is now Queen Margaret I. (This is particularly cheeky, managing to ambiguously split the difference between the idea that Thatcher has become the Queen or that Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret, has somehow assumed the throne.) His third story, “The Junkheap That Walked Like a Man,” was, in his description, an exploration of “an environmental theme,” and he also prided himself on a story with “a multicultural flavour” that would involve “Captain Britain taking a young afro-Carribean girl fro a fly-around, to convey a sense of wonder.” (In practice, this story includes the rather unnerving scene of Captain Britain cradling a grinning black girl who tells her white saviour that “I always knew that someone ‘ad… that someone like you’d come and take me and me dad away from this mess.” The comic gives no indication that Captain Britain actually does so.) 

More intriguing (and disturbing) is the plot thread explaining Saturnyne and her goals. Saturnyne’s job is to forcibly improve the fascist world Captain Britain has landed in, which is “the most primitive of all the series of alternate earths” so that the entire set of earths can enter “an era of reason, peace, and enlightenment.” The conservative dystopia that Captain Britain is stuck on is “retarding the whole series,” and so she has developed a potion that will give the entire planet an evolutionary push so that it is redeemed into a more progressive and pleasant place. For better or for worse, however, this never panned out due to Thorpe being removed from the series after only nine installments.

The exact sequence of events at this point is murky. Bernie Jaye, the editor on the book, suggests that “the managing editor was concerned about the political content of Captain Britain and read the riot act,” and that Thorpe, unwilling to make changes, walked off the book. Davis, however, suggests that he instigated the split over a story in which Captain Britain was to go to Northern Ireland, which Davis objected to. Thorpe describes the story as having been based on “a sad, true story, which seemed to epitomise the tragedy of the province, of two children who had met and become friends while away on holiday. But when they returned home to Belfast they realised that they came from opposite sides of the divide,” leading to one child being attacked while visiting the other’s neighborhood. In Thorpe’s story, Captain Britain would see this fight break out and intervene. Thorpe stressed that the story was “even-handed” and did not take sides, but neither Jaye nor Davis were OK with the strip. As Davis tells it, Thorpe rewrote the script such that “Belfast became Fablest, Protestants became Rottenpasts and the Catholics became Coalitch. The Rottenpasts were orange growers and Coalitch were potato growers. This is when I got angry because I was insulted that anyone might think I couldn’t see through something so transparent,” and so he threatened to walk from the strip (which was at the time a side job for him, with his main income coming from working in a warehouse driving forklifts) only to have Marvel UK side with him and sack Thorpe instead. (Thorpe, for his part, not-so-subtly implies that this was because Davis was heavily invested in the conflict, noting in two separate interviews that Davis lived in an area with a significant number of Northern Ireland supporters.) This overstates it - both Thorpe and Jaye note that she had objections as well, and in Thorpe’s account he was not fired so much as politely driven out by an editorial staff that repeatedly declined to approve any of Thorpe’s story ideas. 

The result was that Marvel Super-Heroes #385 was turned over to a Paul Neary-penned story set while Captain Britain was traveling from Otherworld to the alternate universe Thorpe set his stories in, and issue #386 contained a neutered version of Thorpe’s Northern Ireland story in which Captain Britain breaks up a random gang fight, with the issue finally being resolved by Jackdaw “using his mental powers harder than ever before” to get everybody to drink tea laced with Saturnyne’s enhancing fluid, causing everybody to magically start getting along. Captain Britain and Jackdaw return to celebrate the successful push, only to have Alan Moore take over the strip and bring back the thoroughly minor character of Mad Jim Jaspers from Thorpe’s first strip, who in a “mistake of terrible consequence” attacks the Push so that “the insanity within” Jaspers’s mind comes “sluicing outwards… it ripples outwards across the city, across the nation, a tidal wave of writhing lunacy.” 

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, Moore’s first Captain Britain in July of that year, and he took over the art full time in October. 

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. [continued]