Looks like we have confirmation of Captain Britain appearing in Secret Wars.

So, yesterday I posted up a Blog post about how we didn't currently have any clear evidence that Captain Britain (at least in the form of Brian Braddock) would be making an appearance in Marvel's Secret Wars event.

Well, it seems that not long after I posted this up a variant cover by Esad Ribic, for the second issue of the central Secret War limited series, started doing the rounds online. It it shows exactly that. 

That would be Brian, wielding some sort of sword, whose blade is made of energy. 

What exactly that is, I guess we'll have to wait and see. I think it highly unlikely to be 'Excalibur'. Faiza currently has that one. But it does remind me somewhat of modern depictions of the 'Soulsword,' wielded by former New Mutant and current member of Scott Summers' 'Uncanny X-Men' team, Illyana 'Magik' Rasputin.

Probably entirely coincidental. But I guess we'll find out, in time.

The important thing, at least as I see it, is this is a confirmation the he shall be playing at least some role in what comes next. And that's certainly a positive start.

One further thing of note this weekend, which I spotted in this week's Axel-in-Charge column over at Comic Book Resources. This relates to the aftermath of Secret Wars, and how it will be effecting the X-Men.

According to Alonso, Marvel's current editor-in-chief:

The X-Men office is taking the opportunity of "Secret Wars" to build an entire new world for the characters -- to create a shared universe within the X-books that's set off by a huge event/incident/surprise. At that point, they're going to introduce a new team that feels unlike anything you've seen before. It'll be... "extraordinary."

A fair bit of commentary online seems to speculating that this very much sounds like Marvel might be planning to separate the X-Men off into a separate  'Heroes Reborn' style Universe of their own. Something separate to the rest of Marvel's publishing line, with no direct connection to the rest of their books and continuity.

They've done it before, and you could quite easily understand why they might want to. The biggest problem that Marvel have with the X-Men is that (much like the Fantastic Four) they do not own those characters' creative rights in other mediums. Twentieth Century Fox own those. They make X-Men movies and cartoons. Some better than others. Marvel Studios, and more importantly Disney, do not own those.

This goes back to Marvel's teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, back in the 90s. The same period that ultimately also resulted in the winding up and selling off of Marvel UK spurred the publisher to sell of rights to a number of characters, as they tried to keep the business afloat. I know it's a little hard to imagine now, but back then it was really that serious a situation.

Many of you may already have seen that there's a new Fantastic Four movie on the horizon. But don't expect there to be any tie-in comic books. Marvel have cancelled the Fantastic Four comic, and split up the team. Heck, The Human Torch is going to be joining a 'Uncanny Inhumans' title after Secret Wars is done.

The general belief seems to be that Marvel no longer want to make Comics for the properties they don't own in other Media. So Fantastic Four is out. The X-Men on the other hand? Well, the X-Men titles sell much, much higher units. That'd have a financial impact, which might not be quite so easy to justify. But splitting them off into their own pocket universe and continuity, I guess, the logic would be that X-Men fans would still have books to buy, while the rest of the publishing line wouldn't even need to acknowledge their ever having existed.

Now, I'd have to say that this would be a prospect which I would not exactly be happy about. Since his by-proxy absorption into the X-Men office in the late 1980s Captain Britain has been awkwardly allied with the X-Men brand. It was understandable at the time. Chris Claremont created Brian, and he wanted to bring those characters over to his very successful ongoing line of X-men comics. Excalibur was technically (though obviously thematically not) an X-Men title. Even Captain Britain & MI13 was published through the X-Office. There's history here.

In modern Marvel Captain Britain is an Avenger. He fits very naturally into a role which he has always filled, protector of both Marvel's Britain and its Multiverse. He's a true Marvel Universe property.

Twin sister Psylocke, on the other hand, may well have begun that way but became synonymous with the 90s X-Brand. Never absent from those frankly cringeworthy 'X-Men Swimsuit Specials' etc. Criminally misused. Ethnically blurred and confused. But sadly, that is where she has stayed.

If the X-Men are to be split off I honestly wouldn't want Cap to join them. Nor Meggan. Nor Pete Wisdom or any of the other British Excalibur characters. They have far more in common with mainstream Marvel than they ever did with X-Gene. They've always been a poor fit. They need to stay in mainstream Marvel. At all costs in my book.

This also leaves us with the distinct possibility that we could yet end up with one Braddock Twin in one universe, and one in another. And I personally think that this would be a huge waste. We don't get enough Braddock sibling team-ups these days, as it is.

Remember Avengers vs X-Men? One Twin on one side of the divide, as an Avenger. One on the other, as an X-man.

Surely you haven't forgotten how awesomely awkward that encounter was? When they clashed over that? Making full use of such a brilliant metaphor for the entire storyline itself?

Well, you'd be forgiven if you have. Because Marvel forgot to tell that story themselves.

Completely.

Instead we had Brian sitting in a hospital bed (in full costume no less) while Betsy went off and fought with Daredevil. For... some... reason.

Such an incredible wasted opportunity, that one.

Still, nothing is concrete yet. For all I know this is purely hyperbole and press bluster. I'll be keeping an eye on it, all the same. You can bet on that. :)

Until the next time.

Mark (Sword)

Merry Christmas from It Came From Darkmoor...

From Captain Britain vol 2 #14 (December 1986)

Story & Pencils by Alan Davis, Inks by Mark Farmer, Colours for the collected edition by Steve White.

This is the final page from the final issue of the second British Captain Britain series. A landmark issue. A watershed moment.

The many panels of this page would be picked up on in future issues of Uncanny X-Men, New Mutants and Excalibur in the US, but this was the final page of the British produced Captain Britain comic.

But that is not actually my reason for bringing it up, here. I've come back to this issue in particular because (And I know that this is somewhat of a rarity these days) a Christmas Issue. Marvel UK did not do many of those, but this story (For me at least) captures the spirit of Christmas in a way which is so very typically British.

'Should Auld Acquaintance...' begins on Christmas Eve with Brian and Meggan setting in front of an open fire flowing right through to the chimes of Midnight on New Year's Eve; covering the whole of Christmas Week.

(And for the benefit of American readers here in the UK it really is a week, not just Christmas Day. Outside of Retail most Offices close down for Christmas week. I kid you not.).

It has everything. From old friends dropping round unannounced...

To scenes out in the snow.

From children opening presents on Christmas Morning...

To reunions with Loved Ones... with a little Christmas magic.

From trying to find that perfect Party Attire...

To that frantic dash as the clock chimes twelve on New Year's Eve.

And, in the spirit of the New Year, two men who have never seen eye to eye find common ground, agree to bury the hatchet, and look to the future.

2012 has been a funny old year. I'm glad to have reached the end of it, and I'd like very much to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Go home. Eat, Drink and be Merry. Spend quality time with your friends, family and other loved ones. Yeah. Even the ones you don't necessarily get on with so well.

Because it's Christmas. Let this be your watershed moment.

May Santa bring you everything you wanted, and may 2013 bring you even more.

And I'll hopefully see you back here in the New Year. :)

Mark (Sword)

From the X-Men Panel Liveblog at San Diego Comic Con...

This...

So there you go. From Rick Remender himself. Uncanny X-Force will be going to Otherworld.

Needless to say I'll be keeping tabs on that....

Random Misc #1

Nova, Uncanny X-Men, Killpower and the shape of things to come.

Greetings once more loyal It Came From Darkmoor reader,

Yes, it's been a while. During the month of may I mostly gave over the computer to my other half, for a project of her own she was working on. Maybe at some later date I will be able to tell you more at that. But for now just understand that May was a month away from the site, which as it happened also tied in with a heck of a lot of other things on my plate. I continued to post in Twitter and elsewhere online, especially around the unfortunate cancellation of Captain Britain & MI13, all the same.

A great thank you to those of you who sent Birthday wishes to me at the start of June. In the past few weeks I have experienced turning 30, finding a new house and arranging a mortgage, on top of starting at a new gym and a build-up of work from my employers too. I've meant to jump in with an update sooner, but time has not been on my side. Further on in this bulletin (So please keep reading to the end)I'll be detailing just where I'm going to be going from here, in order to get back on track. I think you'll like it.

But in the meantime Marvel UK properties have continued to pop up in modern continuity. And as always I've been watching out for them...

Starting out with Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning's Nova, which became part of the DnA devised Cosmic Crossover Event "War of Kings". But meanwhile, in May's #23 a plot which has been building in the background for a while finally came to a very significant point, as far as Marvel UK fans are concerned.

You may remember back in October I first mentioned how Death's Head II's programmer, Dr Evelyn Necker, had shown up in the pages of Nova (Who the Necker You?). We know from Abnett and Sharp's Death's Head II that some ten years into the future an Evelyn Necker was working for AIM, having created Project Minion - a cyborg designed to assimilate the greatest scientific and warrior minds from galactic history. And here we had a slightly younger Evelyn Necker working for Project PEGASUS, who just happens to also be running a personal project called 'Project Minion,' along with some 'Death's Head' cyborgs which happened to look suspiciously like the Minion Cyborg who would later become Death's Head II.

But at that point we still had never seen a finite link between Necker working for PEGASUS and her future self. Until May's #23.

To catch you up to speed, at this point Richard Rider has had the Nova force removed from him (After a falling out with a corrupted Worldmind) and discovered that as a result he is actually now dying from the damage the Nova force did to his body. He has been consulting Dr Necker about ways of keeping him alive. However, that comes to an end when Norman Osborn turns up and shuts down Project PEGASUS, seizing its resources now that he runs the replacement organization for SHIELD.

Necker though is not willing to let Richard Rider die. So she grabs what records she has, throws him into her car, and drives them to a secret laboratory, hidden below an abandoned Drive-In movie theatre. To which Richard queries if Dr Necker 'Works for SHIELD'. She replies (Click to enlarge):


And there you have it. The circle is complete. Necker HAS been working for AIM. Now whether this means that Abnett and Lanning may yet choose to try bringing back a new version of Death's Head (Always a good idea, yes?) remains to be seen. But the doorway is open, and the option is there.

Plus, this unexpected little moment:


Certainly leaves further appearances in the pages of Nova as a possibility. She's not Gamora, but I can think of worse couplings out there..

May also threw me a very unexpected curve-ball in the pages of Matt Fraction and Greg Land's Uncanny X-Men, which momentarily cheered me up during the news of Captain Britain's cancellation. This one came quite out of the blue. In Uncanny they'd been building up a storyline involving Madelyn Pryor, Cyclops's ex-wife and clone of Jean Grey, creating a 'Sisterhood' of Evil Mutants... To be honest, I wasn't really that interested. But then, in Uncanny X-Men #508, Fraction had this Sisterhood going to Japan to retrieve a body. The original British body, it seemed of one Elisabeth Braddock. A body they healed back to health, somehow, before this happened:



'Hold on a second...,' I thought,'Did that just happen?'

Yes. It did. They put Psylocke back into her real body, again.

And the cover of Uncanny #509 continued with that:



Now, I've probably mentioned before that I have certain problems with the way {Psylocke has been written over the past 15 years. Back in the early 90s Chris Claremont had British telepath (And non-mutant twin sister of Captain Britain) modified by Spiral and Mojo, and brought under the service of Marvel's Japanese ninja cult The Hand. At the end of the previous storyline, in order to escape death, the X-Men travelled through mystical gateway The Siege Perilous. Each character found themselves somewhat altered and split apart from the group as a result.

Longshot and Dazzler ended up in another dimension. Rogue ended up with Magneto in the Savage Land. Colossus ended up in England, where he believed he was a British painter. And Psylocke ended up brainwashed and physically modified into an assassin.

The actual story which detailed Psylocke's journey, by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee (In Uncany X-Men #256-258), remains one of my favourite stories of all time. The references to Captain Britain's solo series, and Betsy's past relationships with BOTH of her brothers is really well written.

But when Claremont left Uncanny things began to get a little silly.

The change was never meant to be permanent. None of the other X-Men stayed the way they'd been left. But Marvel editors and marketing men liked a ninja who fought in a swimsuit like costume. Great for 1990s Marvel Swimsuit Specials! And so it stuck...

Fabian Nicieza retconned Psylocke's body modification into a Body Swap, with a
Japanese ninja named Kwannon. The two fought, then reconciled. Kwannon even briefly joined the X-Men, as Revanche, before being killed off by a virus. Thus removing any possibility of ever putting Betsy back into her real body.

I personally hate it. Most Psylocke fans I know out there also hate it. In fact many new readers do not even realise that Betsy Braddock is English. Because she doesn't look English, and over the years writers have struggled to write her dialogue, mannerisms and personality AS English. In fact she's almost been overwritten as being Japanese on a couple of occasions.

I personally detest the Japanese body, because it's an odd contradiction. None of her personality is trained towards that culture. And the longer she stays in that form the longer all ties to her former life, as a supermodel and agent of British espionage organisation STRIKE, go unexplored. Furthermore Marvel changed her Marvel UK power-set of telepathic blasts and precognitive flashes to badly explained telekinetic powers a while back. So seeing her finally back in her real British body, as fans have been pleading for over 15 years, and using those psi powers to manifest a psychic knife, I was cock-a-hoop!

Unfortunately, Marvel have a habit of disappointing me at the moment...


Yeah. You saw that right. Betsy Psi-bladed her brains out.

(Although there was a nice little interchange between Betsy and Dazzler there, which did at least acknowledge the characters' comradeship in the X-Men 'Outback Years'. A small bonus. Very small...)

She's now found her way back into her Swimsuit Ninja body, and the British one is firmly dead again. To call it disappointing doesn't really cover it. I understand that she'll be getting part of her Psi Powers back, but what a waste. It makes the characters back history even more complicated. That's never a good thing.

Now a couple of months back I mentioned how Motormouth had turned up as an agent of MI13, in Captain Britain & MI13. Here she was:



At the time she stated that her partner, Killpower, was captured when Dracula broke into the Hussain household (Faiza 'Excalibur' Hussain's parents) while they were assigned to protect them. Well, in this month's penultimate issue #14 Killpower does indeed make an appearance. I won't show too much, as it will give away a bit of plot which shouldn't be spoiled. You should go and buy yourself a copy instead. But just to reassure those who wanted to know for sure that he was in there, here you go:



The rest I leave up to you.

Whilst we're still on the subject of CB&MI13, I'm still trying to track down the second Marvel trade of the book. The Panini one has been out for a while, but the final copy of Marvel's own version of trade in Forbidden Planet, Coventry, was swiped from my grasp by another. So I went home and placed an order with Amazon instead. Two weeks later it still hadn't shipped, and so I sent them an email to find out why. I received the following:

"Dear Mr M A Roberts,

Thank you for contacting us at Amazon.co.uk.

Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience, but "Captain Britain And MI13 Volume 2: Hell Comes To Birmingham TPB" appears to have been a surprise sellout.

When you placed your order [ORDER # BLANKED OUT], we believed we had access to more copies - we then discovered that every one of our distributors had rapidly sold out.

Major distributors have thousands of copies on order from the publisher, all
apparently awaiting the next print run. As soon as more copies become available,we'll be able to dispatch them to our customers.

We will update you once we have received an estimated arrival date from the vendor."

well, it's a bugger for me. I'll have to keep on waiting, but in a certain light is good to at least know that perhaps, in some small way, Marvel might have made enough off trade sales to wonder if they've been a bit hasty about the book. Vocal fan pressure certainly hasn't eased up any. In fact that many people posted Captain Britain & MI13 questions on for Joe Quesada on CBR's Cup of Joe that they farmed it out into a separate article: Joe Quesada Talks Captain Britain, Event Fatigue

Oh, and the big news I meant to post separately - Panini's Captain Britain vol. 3 (The Lion and the Spider) finally came out! And for those Black Knight fans this one starts reprinting those Black Knight & Captain Britain stories from Hulk Comic. And about time too. Here's an Amazon link (But remember, there ARE other retailers): ISBN-10: 1846534011 and ISBN-13: 978-1846534010

And finally, onto what comes next for It Came From Darkmoor. A few of the older features have become a bit absent recently. I'll be trying to get a Cover of the Week up each week as a bare minimum, and the 'Who the Hell is...?' profiles will return in coming months, but I'm going to try and shake things up with a couple of new odds and ends, too.

Firstly, it's now been a good ten years since I read some of the Marvel UK material I talk up on this site and elsewhere. Partly to makes sure this Blog covers all angles, and partly to keep it all fresh in my mind ( ;D ) I'll be starting to re-read a few series and posting my thoughts, issue by issue, on here where and when I get the chance. I'll probably be beginning with the imprint years, but if anybody has a request for something earlier then by all means drop me a line at theswordisdrawn@googlemail.com . It may have a bearing on my final decision if enough of you want a deeper look at one specific series.

And secondly is an idea I considered early last year, but never quite got around to. The idea was to do an A to Z of some of the more obscure Marvel UK properties - some of which hadn't been covered in any detail before on the Blog or were just obscure characters which I loved, but others probably don't remember. The intention was to broaden the showcase of characters currently visible online.

Recently I did talk with Judge Dredd Megazine's Matthew Badham, about helping him out with a Marvel UK A to Z. That project sadly did not come off, but it got me thinking about the original idea and motivated me enough to start work on it proper. Matt's a bloody nice bloke, and he says he's okay with it, so look out for this new feature in the next couple of weeks.

If there is anything else you'd like to request, then by all means do. You have my email address and I'm always interested to hear what you guys think of the site.

You can also find me on Twitter at @theswordisdrawn where I frequently whitter on about more general Comic Book topics and anything which I happen to have found quite amusing that day. Feel free to drop by.

Right, well that's it for now. It's gone midnight and my eyes are dry from fatigue and continuing hayfever irritation(Thought - Why do I always get hayfever worse, directly after it's rained? There's something not right about that.)

Hope you all enjoy your week.

Speak soon

Mark
Sword)