A beginning

Hi there. 

This is a new blog, so I’m sure that if you’ve stumbled upon it you have the usual legitimate questions.

What’s the remit? Who the hell am I? Why have I started it up? Possibly what the hell is Darkmoor, anyway? Etc...

Well, to introduce myself, my name is Mark Roberts, and I'm a comics enthusiast from the UK. Many regular posters to forums such as Comixfan and Comic Book Resources will know me better as The Sword is Drawn - my long time username, pilfered from the title of the graphic novel which introduced Marvel's first British superteam, Excalibur.

A while back a few regular posters out there suggested that I aught to start up a blog (I suspect partially to stop me from posting so much Excalibur-related piffle on said messageboards.) where I could stack up my ideas. I wasn't immediately sure. I toyed with it for a while. This is what I eventually settled on.

For those who don't know, Darkmoor is a fictitious area of moorland in Marvel's Britain. There's not a lot out there - a Research Centre where a student period Brian Braddock once worked and a castle which Dark Angel used for a while - but its real significance in terms of Marvel UK is that it was the setting for the first British originated Marvel material - 1976's Captain Britain Weekly #1. It was the place where Brian Braddock first stepped into the stone circle, and was asked to make his choice of two artefacts - the Sword or the Amulet - and became Captain Britain.

But that's a blog for another day...

The thing is, I wasn't even born when Marvel UK began publishing its own stuff, in '76. I was three years late for that. But in some strange fashion I can't truly get it out of my head. I read Marvel's UK titles as a kid - Transformers, Thundercats, Death's Head and as many US reprints of X-Men as I could find. US market comics were harder to get your hands on in the UK back in the 80s. Despite now being 28 (and probably by rights I should know better by now) I find myself still caring for the characters from the UK corner of Marvel's universe - sometimes feeling the need to explain them in detail. The daft thing is that many of them weren't even that great. Some were just plain better as concepts than the material they appeared in. But even at their patchiest the bottom line is that Marvel UK was ours. Made here in blighty, giving us a tiny foothold in Marvel’s world, and that was something to be proud of.

Sure, the Marvel UK imprint closed down in the mid-90s, but despite a gap of more than a decade I still find myself thinking about what stories could or should have happened in the years since then. What happened to the characters and the places? Why didn't we see them again? Is Death's Head still lost in space, having fragmented conversations with his other personalities? Does Motormouth still have a potty-mouth? Did Dark Guard ever end?

Who can say? Maybe we'll find out someday. Maybe not.

It has always disappointed me that the mainstream comic book industry in the UK has somewhat dwindled since Marvel UK folded. Sure, we still have 2000 AD, Doctor Who Magazine and a strong indie scene, but the bulk of what lines the newsagent's shelves is a US reprint. And yet, when you think of some of the biggest current and recent names in the American comic book industry? Mark Millar, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Chris Claremont, Alan Davis, Mike Carey, Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch...

Yeah, they're all British.

So what went wrong?

When I ask that question on primarily US market messageboards I usually get the same dry answer - 'Because nobody gives a %^&* about UK based stories or characters'.

Maybe some people actually believe that, but when I think back over the last year or so Marvel alone have put out a number UK based stories. From Christos Gage's Union Jack series, to New Excalibur, to Paul Cornell's Wisdom series. Heck, even Ed Brubaker's Captain America (And lets be fair you don't get a much more American character than Cap) spent an arc in London last year, in the storyline 21st Century Blitz.

2008 will bring us a new ClanDestine series from Alan Davis and a new incarnation of Excalibur (Back to the original name, without the 'New' tag) from Paul Cornell.

If nobody gives a %^&* then how come there's so much going on out there? It's like a mini-renaissance for British characters in Marvel, right now. And I'm loving it.

And so that's what this blog is going to be all about. A bit of nostalgia for the past, and seeing where the characters of the past fit into modern Marvel. It's a place to help me keep track of that, and hopefully you'll get something out of it, too.

So please, Enjoy! And let me know what you think.

Mark (The Sword is Drawn).