I would say that Moore & Delano's turns on Captain Britain are both "political" in the same way that Claremont's best work on X-Men was political: When Claremont did all that stuff with the NSA and the President funding Project: Wideawake and greenlighting Shaw Industries to producte Sentinels and so on, it was definitely in the realm of superhero fiction, still, but there was also an implicit level of criticism going on. Mutants are, of course, the Mighty Marvel Metaphor for everything, and issues like Project: Wideawake, the Mutant Registration Act, the trial of Magneto before the UN, and so on allowed Claremont (and other writers) to look at aspects of the real world without getting involved in direct political commentary. When Genosha was run by humans it was a stand-in for South Africa. When it was run by mutants it was a stand-in for Israel.
Overall in Captain Britain this "political" aspect is a matter of the tone of the series. The first episode I ever read as a kid was where Linda McQuillan, the superhero Captain UK who has fled her reality after the death of all of the superheroes there at the hands of the Fury, comes to Braddock Manor to warn Captain Britain that the Fury has followed her to his dimension. Cap and the Special Executive are gathered round the TV, watching Sir James Jaspers give what amounts to an anti-superhuman hate speech. Moore took the deathcamp imagery that Claremont and Byrne had created in 'Days of Futures Past' and upped it a notch, describing the filth, the brutality of the guards, the fleas and disease. More radically, these death-camps weren't set in a nightmarish future run by soulless machines. They were set in Britain, right (t)here in the 1980's. As a kid, I definitely found it striking, to say the least.
There's also a good section in the Delano run where Thatcher closes down S.T.R.I.K.E, the British equivalent of S.H.I.E.L.D, and replaces them with the rather more thuggish Resources Control Executive (RCX). The RCX come to Braddock Manor to recruit the Captain to serve as their national figurehead. When he says that he won't get involved with politics they try to convince him by invoking the breakdown of national identity that Britain is undergoing. He replies that he's empowered to be a hero, not a symbol of someone else's political ideology.
It's this ideological split which causes Brian to (temporarily) give up being Captain Britain and puts the mantle on Betsy's shoulders in time for some pretty brutal treatment at the hands of Slaymaster. (Interestingly, this last bit, which is often attributed to Delano, was actually written by Alan Davis himself, who handled the book on his own for the last few issues. I often think Davis is underrated as a writer-artist, although admittedly he's had some misfires.)
Is it any good? Well, it's certainly no 'Marvelman', which you have to remember Moore was already working on. But, yeah, for high-quality retro '80's gonzo darkside superhero surrealism, I think it's pretty damn cool. |
