krisis

Guide to Captain Britain (Early Access for ALL PATRONS)

Added 2019-11-02 14:01:01 +0000 UTC

Today I have a solo guide for a character who previously lived in the shadow of a team guide on the site - and, also, a lesson about what to do when life hands you lemons.

Captain Britain - The Definitive Reading Order and Collecting Guide

(As an X-Men character guide, this guide is available to all Patrons!)

Log in to CK to access this guide. Leave a comment if you do not have access to your CK login and I'm happy to help.

I know, I know - you already knew how to collect Captain Britain, it was on the Excalibur guide page!

This new solo page is way better than that. It includes more collections, more series information, and more cameos. It especially has a lot more information on Cap's stint as a UK character.

I'm quite sure it is now the most-accurate continuity information about him on the entire internet.

Captain Britain was on my list of characters to break out into solo pages, as I did a while ago with Deadpool and Cable, but I wouldn't say it was a high priority. Captain Britain isn't exactly driving a lot of demand and traffic for my site.

Then, two big comic-related things happened within 48hrs this week.

First, on Wednesday, a new Excalibur title launched as part of Dawn of X - the new line-up of x-books curated by Jonathan Hickman. In this new series, Betsy Braddock (AKA Psylocke) takes on the role of Captain Britain from her brother who is... indisposed.

I had planned to make Excalibur the first of my rolling updates through existing guides to coincide with this launch. In taking a look at the structure of that guide - as well as at the Captain Britain mythology referenced in the issue - it seemed to make sense to break Cap out to a separate guide.

"Great," I thought, "a quick 2-4hr Marvel project to get me back into practice."

Then, on Thursday, ComicBookDB.com (AKA CBDB) announced the site would close in 45 days.

This is catastrophic news for Crushing Krisis.

In case you are not in the know, CBDB is the premiere wiki-based database covering all comic books on the web. While Comics.org has a greater scope of data coverage, CBDB is more readily updated and presented more plainly in a database format with obvious relationships between objects like Publishers, Titles, Issues, and Characters.

For a data-brained person like me, that's a goldmine of information! It has informed my comic guides from the start, back in 2010.

Not only does CBDB track every modern collection and their contents, but it has an extremely complete list of character appearances and creator credits that it can display in chronological order. No other comic sites do that. Plus, it very rarely has errors, and because it attracts data-brained people like me those errors tend to be quickly corrected.

I've designed all of CK to be compatible with CBDB and its naming conventions, and a lot of my automated and/or rehearsed guide-building processes include multiple checks against CBDB data.

(For example, after I establish what I believe to be a Marvel character's chronological list of appearances from multiple sources (including my own reading and Marvel's Official Indexes), I have a spreadsheet that compares that list to the chronological appearance list pulled from CBDB and then puts that list order of story continuity to see if I missed any cameos. I spent weeks building it back in 2015, because it turns a process that used to take me hours per guide into something that takes me minutes.)

(Also, my personal reading database, which grows about 4000 issues a year, is designed to interact seamlessly with data pulled from CBDB.)

(You get the point. I'm probably one of the 10 heaviest users of CBDB on the planet.)

After a few hours of blind panic about the news, I decided to re-focus my nervous energy on my Captain Britain guide. It would be a chance to see how long it would take me to build a guide from scratch without CBDB, since I already tracked his appearance and collections on the Excalibur page to use as a proof of my work.

Well, I have some good news and bad news.

The good news is: I finished the guide!

The bad needs is that the guide took me twice as long as I expected due to avoiding CBDB as much as possible, but it was impossible to verify without referring to CBDB a number of times. As much as I tried to avoid it, there were multiple points where I had a question that could not be resolved in any way without referencing CBDB.

Remember when I said "my best laid plans will always go awry" in that last post? This is that to the max.

I don't share all of that news to put you in a panic about the future of Crushing Krisis and new guides. I have a lot of non-CBDB-based failsafes. I also have a lot of data backed up from CBDB. Plus, my 150+ existing guides have been built to be a sort of human-curated take on CBDB's organizational style, which means I've already designed a ton of reference material for myself (just as Excalibur was for this guide).

However, my point is that making these guides can take a lot of effort, and one of the biggest enablers to reducing that effort is about to disappear.

That means I have to change my plans for the next 45 days to maximize my use of CBDB while I can - which might actually mean more work on CK than I intended! Some of that might be deep in the background.

Enough about all of that - what about Captain Britain?!

Captain Britain is an interesting case because he, his sister Psylocke, and his extended mythology are one of only two major imports from Marvel UK to American Marvel.

(I'd say the other is Death's Head.)

Not only that, but Captain Britain is one of the characters who has had the biggest impact on Marvel's Universe. Ever.

That's because of Alan Moore, who briefly scripted Captain Britain along with artist Alan Davis across several UK series just before he dug into Swamp Thing and moved on to Watchmen.

Together, Moore and Davis established the Captain Britain Corps, which are like a multi-universal version of the Green Lantern Corps. With so many alternate Earths in the system, they'd need some kind of designation - just like Green Lanterns refer to Earth's section of space as Sector 2814.

Moore named Marvel's main version of Earth "Earth-616."

Yes, 616. Ring any bells?

"616" is Marvel's official designation for main-continuity Earth. All of the present day, non-Ultimate stories that you love at Marvel are set in "616 Continuity," and that term came from a British Captain Britain comic book.

In case that isn't enough of a shocking revelation for one post, here's another: Captain Britain and Psylocke were created by Chris Claremont in 1976 and first published in the same two-month frame that he introduced Jean Grey as Phoenix in Uncanny X-Men (1963) #101 (a bi-monthly title, back then).

It gets better.

Drawing Captain Britain in Marvel Super-Heroes (1979) #377 was Alan Davis's first professional comics work (or maybe second, depending on how you count) . Ever. He was working in a warehouse while he drew that first series. Davis wound up adopting Captain Britain as his pet project, and when he moved on to American comics work for DC in 1985 Marvel UK ended Cap's series.

OH BUT IT GETS EVEN BETTER.

Davis's first American Marvel work after leaving DC? He drew New Mutants Annual 2, which Claremont used to introduce his creation Psylocke to American comics before bringing her to the X-Men in UXM #213, also with Davis. And then, of course, Claremont and Davis worked together for a few years on Excalibur, also starring Captain Britain.

So, not only is Captain Britain responsible for the 616, but he is the same age as The Phoenix, and brought both X-Men mainstay Psylocke and all-time-great Alan Davis to American comics.

There aren't a lot of post-Silver Age comic characters with that kind of significance.

Despite all of those milestones, Captain Britain is weirdly absent from Marvel comics whenever Claremont and Davis aren't around. Aside from his 2008 Paul Cornell / Leonard Kirk ongoing (which is amazing), he's just an occasional guest star who has lately been relegated to the quiet life as a headmaster and father...

...that is, until this week.

What's up next for comic guides?

Who the heck even knows at this point?!

I'm joking. Sort of.

I have 3-4 guides picked out for November and already in progress. Yet, as mentioned above I need to be super-focused on future-proofing myself for the impending disappearance of CBDB, which has so far involved all sorts of wild computer programming and automation and chron jobs and stuff. It's very nerdy.

If those guides occur as planned, they will be: one massive DC guide I have been struggling with all year; another Marvel guide that extracts and expands something from one of my existing guides; another Patron-picked indie title; and a DC guide for a currently-popular property.

If they all happen I think you'll be pretty pleased with the line-up ;)

As always, I value your feedback - both on this new guide and in general. Don't hesitate to comment to let me know your thoughts - including what's on your most-wanted guides list!

Current Exclusives For Crushing Cadets ($1/month): 17 Guides!

DC Guides: Batman - Index of Ongoing Titles, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight

Marvel Guides: Alpha Flight, Blade, Captain Britain, Dazzler, Domino, Dracula, Elsa Bloodstone, Legion, Marvel Era: Marvel Legacy, Sabretooth, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Weapon X, X-Man - Nate Grey