Excalibur

Three ex-X-men and two characters from the sporadic adventures of Marvel’s one UK-based hero were teamed up in the mid 80s as a light-hearted spin-off of the mutant adventure.  Nightcrawler, the Rachel Summers Phoenix and Kitty Pryde, Captain Britain and Meggan, along with Lockheed, Widget and Alistaire Stuart, were the greatest British heroes.

I came across them in the newsagents at Market Weighton, 16 or 17 issues into the series which featured a bizarre cross-time setting of a world that came across as a mixture of Star Wars and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ take on Mars.  Phoenix had gone a little mad after an alternate universe version of her mother, Jean Grey, was killed before her eyes and was dressing up as a masked swashbuckler, there was a giant dragon-man version of Lockheed and everybody died but Meggan and Phoenix and then they were brought back and there was a scene in a spaceport and a cameo by Professor Xavier and the Starjammers.  It was the piling on of ideas, alongside baroque overblown superheroics that worked for me.  (Along with Alan Davis’ fluid lush pencils, enhanced by the exactness of Paul Neary’s inks.)

British superheroes don’t really work.  We don’t have multiple metropolises with skyscrapers and dark alleys to create the landscape needed for a Spider-man or Batman to work.  For this reason, British superheroes tend to be tied to those things we do have plenty of.  Magic and legend.

Captain Britain was made over from being a run of the mill crimefighter to being connected to an otherworldy empire that was just a part of a vast omniversal structure.  His enemies shifted from robbers and assassins to transdimensional bountyhunters, reality-warping government ministers and their Lewis Carroll inspired creations.  Whimsy and science fiction and magic had been part of British superheroes in the past.  Marvelman, arguably the best-known straight superhero, was a refit of Captain Marvel, the little kid who transforms into a superman when he says Shazam, and would routinely fight vikings and travel in time.  The steel claw was a man who wore a metal glove that turned him invisible and the Spider was a supervillain.

Superheroes aplenty there were, but none of them worked properly because superheroes are an American thing, and they don’t fit into Britain that well.  They don’t fit into our mindset very well.

Think of our icons.  Sherlock Holmes is a drug addict and anti-social.  The Doctor is an intellectual elitist who acts like a spoiled child or else uses people like chess pieces.  James Bond is a misogynist killer snob.  Dennis the Menace is a thug who beats up softies.  Desperate Dan is an American in a very British version of the wild west.  Judge Dredd is a fascist.  Alice is a little girl on a trip.  Peter Pan steals children and never grows up.  Robin Hood is a thief.

We don’t do heroes very well.  We don’t really believe in them, because a hero is a show-off, and that’s not a very British thing unless it’s undercutting itself with irony.  (Or it used not to be.)

So Excalibur was never straightforward superheroes.  It was always about whimsy and magic and universal jackanapery.  It was fun and it was about relationships.  It was about Sat-Yr-9 pretending to be Courtney Ross and perverting Kitty.  It was about the love triangles revolving around Kurt, Brian and Meggan and Kitty, Alistaire and Rachel.  It was about the mystery of Widget.

And then it lost its way.  They tried to make it into just another X-men book by getting rid of anyone who wasn’t an X-Man.  And then they gave it to Warren Ellis.

And Warren took the British fear of the apocalypse, so strong in our fiction since H. G. Wells at least, through Johns Wyndham and Christopher and Michael Moorcock, through Alan Moore, and he ground that into the Britishness of black humour and gentle perversion and brought something of the old magic back.

And as such, Excalibur remains a favourite.  I just re-read a few issues and found myself sucked in again.  It’s not the sort of thing being done at the moment.  Paul Cornell had a go a year ago but was too jingoistic, gloried too much in celebrating being British, that he stole any bite that Captain Britain and the MI:13 might’ve had.  As well as saddling CB with being a superhero!  Not right, he got past that a long time ago.