Dan Dare, Test Match Cricket, Captain Britain, And The Comforting Myths Of Englishness

1.

It usually happens during an unimportant home match for the England Cricket team, or at least during an inconsequential passage of play of a home international. It tends to take me when it's sunny and the grass in our back garden is beginning to get a little unruly, when the summer day is still and the only sign of any wind is to be found by staring at the silver branches of a distant 50 foot poplar. These are the suggestible hours. Lunch has been eaten, the paper has been read, and it's impossible to focus on the white pages of some less-than-demanding holiday page-turner without sun-glasses.


It rarely happens now. It can't be summoned up by the newest generation of commentators, with their everyman middle-class accents pegged from somewhere between Birmingham and Uxbridge. (Fine accents all, of course, but the myth requires a more exalted, a more exclusive, tone to invoke its ghosts to life.) Henry Blofeld, the last if not the most significant of the old magicians, with Arlott and Johnson so long gone now, rarely hauls himself into the stiff-backed seat behind the broadcaster's microphone these day. The years have carried him on from supremely promising schoolboy batsman down from the first team's ranks to the rows of the elderly gentlemen who slumber on deck-chairs waiting for the cucumber sandwiches to appear. But at the Lords test matches, its still traditional to hear his rich, hammy, somewhat breathless mixture of rolling public school vowels and boundless enthusiasm for the minutiae of the cricketing spectacle, burbling out of radio.

In truth, the very plummy enthusiasm of Blofeld, constantly surprised by red buses and low-flying aeroplanes and the untypical arrival of a Chiffchaff on the field of play, is equally as irritating as it is endearing. There's something so perfectly 1950s, so utterly Ealing Comedy, about his radio persona, that it can slowly begin to irritate the punter's ear . The Englishness is so perfectly portrayed that there's apparently no real "Henry Blofeld" there at all, as if he were an actor so lost in his role that, like Peter Seller's once so bathetically said, " .... there is no me. I do not exist." Yet, that helps the spell too. Blofeld is charming enough for me to want to share his affable, scatter-brained company, and wearying enough for me to allocate to him a murmuring part in the background noise of this summer's day. And that helps the spell too.


It will happen before I'm even aware of it, and the spell will last only so long as I'm not. There will be some small example of sporting behaviour on the pitch. Not some act of conspicuous if laudable affection, such as Flintoff's comforting of Lee after the Second Test was lost by Australia in 2005, but some tiny gesture. A batsman will, without sarcasm, applaud a bowler's last ball. A catch will be so special that we'll hear of the batting side's balcony nodding in respect at their own man's wicket falling. Or there'll be a statement of generosity towards the away team by a BBC commentator, or the same offered by a guest summariser from the visiting team's side towards England. And then it won't be Pakistan or England or the West Indies anymore, won't be 22 men straining and swearing to turn a game of cricket. It won't even be about cricket at all. It will be, for a moment, all about "England". England, the mythical land of decency and democracy, where heroic chaps from distant nations and quite distinct cultures can gather together to compete in the spirit of Christian fair play on the sporting fields of Lords and Wimbledon and, perhaps, Wembley. The England that John Major described as "the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pool fillers, and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mists". The mind might imagine rising above the main stand and seeing, beyond it, not the modern version of George Orwell's "... Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of lorries on the Great West Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs ...", but endless rolling green fields, tall oaks being felled by sturdy yeoman for ships of war, villages clustered around the spires of little churches, small rivers winding to the Thames, and to the sea. Our sea. The English sea. The same England that so many of the fighter pilots of the Battle Of Britain wrote of, so movingly, the same England they saw in their imagination when they were summing up what it was they were fighting for.

2.


But in Paul Richey's "Fighter Pilot", he describes flying his Hurricane from RAF No 1 Squadron back after combat over France in 1940 to England and seeing " ... a game of cricket below on a village green pitch. With my mind still full of the blast and flame that had shattered France, I was seized at utter disgust at the smug insular contentedness that England enjoyed behind her sea barrier."

3.


In the very first Dan Dare adventure, which began to be serialised weekly in the Christian boy's comic "Eagle" in 1950, we were introduced to the " ... Inter Planet Space Fleet some years in the future". It's an odd organisation, in that it's clearly meant to be Earth's "Space Fleet", but it's clearly really just the Royal Air Force in orbit and beyond. The Fleet's HQ is in England, the Fleet's pilots are predominantly English. It's a strip proud of and haunted by England's finest hour. The end is constantly nearing, great sacrifices by good chaps are constantly required. Wonderfully conceptualised and executed by Frank Hampson and his team, it's a rip-snorting adventure tale of upper-class, southern-English space pilots and their working class sidekicks.

And then, some 17 months later, something extraordinary happens within this most splendid, and most splendidly, English of comic strips. In The Eagle of the 7th September 1951, we are introduced to the Commander of the Earth's invasion forces primed to blast off in the direction of Venus and the dread Mekon. The invasion force itself is international, but it's a white invasion force. White Canadians, White Americans, White South African, White Scandinavians. The world is to be saved by England and her white allies again.


Until then we see Dan saluting the invasion forces' commander. And the Commander, whom Colonel Dan Dare treats with all due deference and a healthy measure of respect too, is a man of colour. In his future-UN uniform, his head largely covered by his helmet and the huge yellow straps that keep it in place, the Commander could be a black man, or he may be of South-East Asian ancestry. (Perhaps the conspicuously large helmet covers a turban. Perhaps he is, for example, a Sikh.) Whatever, Dan Dare damn well calls him "sir" and means it! And this is still shocking, and tremendously heartening, to read. I can think of no other example in all the comics I've ever read of a man of colour occupying such a splendid office self-evidently through merit, not from the '50s right through for a great many years. The Commander is supremely free of accent or affectation. He is precise in his speech, inspires loyalty and fondness from his men, and is capable of joking with his subordinates in that way that relaxes them without doing the same for their discipline. That the Commander doesn't take centre-stage during the invasion of Venus as Colonel Dan and his crew do is regretful, but he still appears to direct the battlefield and to finally nominate Dan to receive the Treen surrender. And what's so significant about the panel in which that nomination occurs is that we see Dan from the high-angle perspective of the Commander, who is mounted on a horse and towers over the injured hero. There can be no doubt who is the power here. It's the man of colour, not Dan Dare.

And I have always been proud of Dan, and his world, and Frank Hampson, for being more than merely supremely English. The issue of race rarely pops its head up again in Dan Dare, except in that it's soon largely conspicuous by its' absence, but here we saw that Dan Dare's England was more than white folks taking orders from white folks. There was something fundamentally different to this future that made England something more than just 'England'. The same mythic potpourri of Arthur and Alfred and Agincourt was broadened with a sincere internationalism and a profound lack of the traditional English ethnocentrism that has always so blighted our culture.


But then, dig a little deeper and Dan Dare's future isn't a typical science-fiction adventure playground. His is an Earth which has faced disastrous wars and has seen all the nations of the world disband their standing armies. This is a world faced by catastrophic starvation. Perhaps you and I might speculate that faced with such terrors, nations might lay down their ploughshares and start making as many swords out of them as they could, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin. But the kindly Christian paternalists of The Eagle could imagine the nations of the world disarming and cooperating in the face of calamity, and whether it seems a feasible future from our cynical present, it's a heartening world all the same. Like Gene Roddenbury's later vision of how Star Trek's Earth drew back from the precipice of atomic war and combined together into a united Earth, and finally The Federation, it's an inspiring future.

Except that Dan Dare's Earth is really still England. England has less embraced the wider world than simply swallowed it. We see few people who aren't white, English and upper-class. There are some charming exceptions, but those apart, this is an England that has somehow set the template for the globe, and done so seemingly without weapons. (Perhaps the British Empire really was an utterly benign force there.) It's a world of stiff-upper lips and cheeky, stubborn other ranks, of a fair and decent order where everybody knows their place, and yet where each rank further up the hierarchy deserves its power and reward, and uses them for those lower down the scale. It's an olde English paradise.

As a myth, it's doesn't feel quite feasible. The Englishness is familiar and comforting. But it doesn't quite seem likely. Even the England of Dan Dare and The Eagle couldn't swallow the entire world so completely that nothing remained but England,

4.


I was born in Wales of Scottish parents, though I can remember nothing of Anglesey or the RAF base my father was stationed at there. While he helped to keep Nimrod early-warning aircraft aloft, I concentrated on growing teeth and howling. Then to Scotland, and council houses and huge ugly housing estates. And then, just as the shift to long trousers began to become a pressing issue, I was transplanted to the London suburbs, to Heathrow, where the now-long defunct British Eagle Airways paid my dad enough money to haul us down from Currie, our home.

I could, had I had any gifts for sport at all, played for any of the Home International sporting teams. Through my Grandmother's Irish origins, I could have worn the green jersey of the Republic's teams too.

I have lived in east and north London, York, Leicester, the countryside between Northampton and Oxford, and East Anglia. In each of them, my accent, mutating as it collected the stray vocal characteristics of wherever I'd last been and adding them to the collection of those I'd picked up before , became one that declared me to be simultaneously a citizen of nowhere and of somewhere-else-from-here.

In London, I was fiercely bullied - and I eventually violently responded - because I was Scots and because we were less than affluent in an affluent county. And so I have never been an Englishman. In Scotland now, however, and the irony is fierce, I am often considered an Englishman, able to be at home only so long as I keep my English mouth, with its English accent, shut.

I am, therefore, British, or, to put it another way, an alien in each of the nations that I at-the-same-time do and don't belong to. And I've always longed to be able to be able to pull some colour of shirt over my head and be a part of something greater than myself.

Or at least, something bigger than myself.

5.


In Paul Cornell's "Captain Britain and MI:13" # 1, the eponymous Captain is killed by a Skrull missile during an alien invasion of Britain. As is the way of super-hero comics, and as was something of a habit for Captain Britain from even early on in his career, our brave Captain is soon resurrected. It's an odd rebirth - as if a restoration to life could be anything other than an oddity - and Mr Cornell is obviously fighting and writing with determination to make some sense of what the "Britain" in Captain Britain does and should mean. On his death, we're told that when " ... Captain Britain died, the British felt it in their chests." To establish the point we're shown 4 panels each representing a different group's response to the Captain's demise; there's some folks weeping in a supermarket or department store, three Anglo-Asian men wracked with grief, what appears to be some young working class men rioting, and finally an old couple sitting together in their loss. It's a clever conceit, and though it's easy to feel that the colourist might have taken a little more time in three of the panels to represent more than the grief of white people, I can appreciate the way it helps re-establish, even in his death, the fact that there is a nation of Great Britain in the Marvel Universe that loves and admires their good Captain.

And the British have indeed always tended to love and respect the men and women who have fought under the Union Jack, whether in what we might today consider good or ill causes. It doesn't mean that we've been willing to actually make ours a "land fit for heroes", as Lloyd George so stridently promised and so cravenly failed to deliver in the wake of World War 1. But we have long been, as Lawrence James has written, a "martial race". Yet I don't find it easy to believe that the mourning for Captain Britain could run that deeply, or be that apparently all-inclusive. The list of groups who would inevitably be at best suspicious of a superhero clothed in Great Britain's flag is a long one. To take but one example, as a teacher I worked with significant numbers of Anglo-Asians, particularly young men, who felt little faith in the symbols of British patriotism. They were absolutely British, but they'd learnt not to trust the flag. What of the Welsh and Scottish nationalists? The apolitical masses? The feminists who might distrust Captain Britain for clothing himself and his muscles in and under the Union Jack? The fascists who have their own agenda for the flag? Pacifists? Super-villains and criminal empires? The list goes on and on.


No doubt on Marvel Earth, Captain Britain has fought so well and so often for the nation that he has won the respect and affection of large swathes of the British public. But a fictional representation of a nation does need to bear close relation to the actual country here on Earth-Not-Marvel. Otherwise, a story that's trying to discuss the present day - as well as detailing which costume is hitting which other costume - can end up bucking the reader out of the narrative. And I can't see that the universal grief depicted here would actually happen in real life. I keep wondering to myself: well, what about all the rest of Britain, and all the folks that just don't care, and all the ones who really aren't friends of the flying flag?

After all, as has been said for so many decades that it's a commonplace, isn't Captain Britain really Captain England? He's a white, male Englishman from an aristocratic family somewhat down on its luck. At the very least, you'd expect alot of Britain to see him as something other
than "theirs".

6.


And then Captain Britain returns, summoned back to life by Merlin, who declares that "At the centre point of Britain, I'll bring 'the hero' back for all". Which, as would be expected from a writer as humane and liberal and just plain inclusive as Mr Cornell, is a lovely idea. The concept that Britain, that Great Britain, is a place where everyone benefits from being there, where everyone belongs, where one man will protect the life and liberty of everyone, even, presumably, of those who don't want there to be a Britain itself, is a beguiling one. (Especially, I can imagine Mr Cornwell say, those who don't wish well of Britain, as long as they're not harming those that do.) "Now he'll be one idea, one symbol!" affirms Merlin, "But like their flag, one thing that contains many."

And all the Union Jacks in Britain rush to cloak the rising hero, and the returned Captain Britain takes hold of Excalibur and steps back into the fray against the alien hordes. And I really do want to believe in this Captain Britain, in this pluralist Britain, in this more-decent-than-not Britain that we're having depicted for us, just as I wanted to believe in Dan Dare's England. But England, when I was a lad, didn't really want me, or so it felt to me as I learned to get kicked off desks and chairs by young Englanders, and mastered the art of throwing desks and chairs back at them in return. Is this Britain of Cornell's any better? Where are its comforting myths, and its uncomfortable truths: what are they? What are people there going to believe in, really believe in, so that this Britain becomes something that truly competes for the citizen's affection? I struggle, but I can't find the facts. England I can find, I know it, and I love it as much as I feel apart from it. Scotland I know as if it were my own family rather than a country, even if some of the nation thinks I'm not one of them because I don't speak like them. But Britain?


As Captain Britain himself says to a Skrull threatening him, "You have no idea what this flag means. It isn't popular. It's not a gesture." Which is true, but then what the hell is this flag? I know a slew of theoretical models that define and explain Britain. That demystify Britain. Britain as historical accident. Britain as agent of economic and cultural imperialism. Britain as English centre and Celtic exploited periphery. Britain as this, Britain as that.

But what are the comforting myths of Britishness? Because the reality of Britain is failing to hold. I know far fewer people who feel British rather than English, or Scottish or Welch. Is Paul Cornell's kinder, more inclusive Britain a myth that can translate into reality, and a myth that could inspire people to want to turn it into reality? Because it sounds remarkably like Labour's unsuccesful attempts in the 1980s to challenge Margaret Thatcher with a coalition of minority groups and some very idealistic policies for everyone else. Yes, it's nice to stand together, and yes the world would be better for us all if we stand together.

But that's not a beguiling myth. To say "we'd be better off being nice now that we're all together here" is a realistic, kindly vision. But I don't think it's particularly inspiring. It worry that it won't bring about the thing it describes.

6.

Every time the comforting myth of Englishness beguiles me, I find some quality of it throws me out of the spell. Even in Dan Dare, even in the Eagle, that most progressive and liberal children's comic of the 1950s and long beyond, there is a moment where an uglier truth breaks through. It happens quite against, I am absolutely convinced, Frank Hampson's conscious humane beliefs, but it happens all the same. In "The Red Moon Mystery", from 1951/2, a murderous alien war machine approaches Earth, the sound of drumming projecting from it terrifying everyone on the globe. Dan Dare's immediate superior, Sir Hubert, speaks to the United Nations Police Commissioner about how the people of the planet are coping with the Red Planet drawing near. (Both men are very obviously very English.) The Commissioner states that he is " ... worried about the tropics. We've never really got rid of the superstition there. A tale of the new red god in the sky is spreading like wildfire. They think it means a return to the old days of devils and bloodshed. Last night we had reports of drums beating - TOO MANY DRUMS!" And accompanying this text is a picture a black man, clad in loin-cloth and lion-mane-head-gear, naked but for an arm-bracelet, fluffy ankle-warmers and a loin-cloth, dancing holding a spear and shield. Other black hands beat on tom-tom drums.


It's enough to make a man weep. It's not that the English, and the British, are any more racist or unfair than most if not all of the nations in the modern world. But it's that the comforting myths say that she isn't, and that smothers the need for debate in the minds of believers. It's that pretence at perfection, at superiority, at being Shakespeare's " ... other Eden, demi-paradise;" that is so seductive. Those of us who are touched by the myth and are yet suspicious of it might search for any corner for where the myth runs absolutely true, where Englishness doesn't mean something ugly as well as something wonderful. A corner such as the world of Dan Dare, for example. And then, when even good and decent people such as the men and women behind "The Eagle", who believed whole-heartedly in "England", fail to notice that the comforting myth carries with it attitudes of "us" being better than "them", it hurts. The capacity to believe that the "tropics" in Dan Dare's mythical future might contain dangerously-irrational, fiercely-superstitious black men, quick to throw away their clothes and pick up the jungle drums, is part of the Myth Of Englishness. Englishness has for many centuries been about us being better than them. And no matter how kind hearted and progressive-thinking Frank Hampson and his people were, they missed this obvious example of what should never have drawn or published. But there the panels sat in the Eagle of 1952, and here they now sit in the lovely Titan Books reprints.


It's not that people can't be imperfect. Of course they can be. We're all imperfect, fundamentally flawed. It isn't that Frank Hampson's massive achievements are negated by one mistake. They are most certainly not. But it is a sign that the myths of Christian Englishness that in this case The Eagle propagated, didn't at the very least contain a strong enough component of anti-superiority, if I may call it that, that would have marked these panels out as wrong. Instead, here we have Englishmen threatened by black men, and the Englishmen will have to use their superior knowledge and culture and power to sort out the problems the black men are causing. Yes, the myths, the story-meshes of values and knowledge and beliefs that influence us, are just odd, old, malleable collections of cultural odds and sods, often sitting in contradiction to each other. But a myth, to be useful and good for us, has to warn us when something is wrong. It has to guide us from bad to good, rather than making us feel that we're synonymous with the good most if not all of the time. And the myth of Englishness still contained enough of the myth of English superiority, of a racial and cultural superiority, that these panels got through.

It's that the myth of Englishness must either be an inspiring guide to a decent and workable reality, or it's nothing but a dangerous and shoddy mythology, as likely to lead the believer astray as towards an Avalon. At the very least, those myths need reformulating, repolishing, retelling. The Ancient Greeks, for example, never thought a myth was set in stone. On and on they retold their myths, prisms in which to view their todays and challenge their yesterdays. Their living, changing, consciously-considered, constantly-reworked myths.


7.

When Captain Britain returns, it seems that everyone in Britain is immediately aware of his resurrection. (I may be misreading the comic, because the folks who actually say they 'know' he's returned are people who actually know him. Perhaps the team of heroes have a way of communicating with each other that I know nothing of.) But it seems as if the flag-wrapped hero's rebirth is signalled to all of those he represents as well as all of those he personally knows. This would make sense. It'd be magic. Merlin has returned, and reshaped, the hero, commanded flags to fly to his place of rebirth: why not let everybody know that the champion has risen, and inspire hope in the face of an overwhelming alien onslaught?

But that leads me to the ugly thought that perhaps the feeling in their chests that the British felt, when Captain Britain died, was not simply grief, but some kind of magically-transmitted sensation. That Captain Britain, and by extension Marvel-Britain itself, is a nation-state created and unified less by political realities or comforting myth or common values, but by magic. And if that's so, then I would have to turn to Monty Python and The Holy Grail, where Dennis responds to Arthur's claims that he is King Of The Britons because the Lady Of The Lake gave him Excalibur: "Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony."

And Dennis is right.

8.


It's a sad irony that nothing has made the British people fonder of the very idea of a British people - if not a British state - than the sacrifice of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. That there is a reality as well as a myth of brave British soldiers falling overseas has brought the people of Britain more together in town-centre welcome-home parades, and ceremonies of respect and rememberance than at any time in decades that wasn't a funeral of a Princess. Nation-states have been welded together by blood before, though I'm in no way suggesting that that's anyone's purpose where the wars today are concerned. But making people love Britain, rather than admiring more the soldiers fighting for her, will take more than respectful parades and public expressions of grief.

We'll need to actually believe in something. We'll need a Britain that's more than just the power-relations, more than just the facts, linking together the parliaments of England, Scotland and Wales.

10.


I've not had many dreams of any consequence in my life. In fact, I've had three. Here is the second that I've used in these entries. In reality, I'm sleeping in a rickety attic somewhere in the countryside of Buckinghamshire. In my sleep, I'm walking down a street that's in a peaceful suburb somewhere better than I've ever been. Either side of me as I walk on are lovely semi-detached suburban houses, safe and clean behind white wood fences and half-hidden by elm and cedar trees. In each front garden stand happy people I clearlyknow, though I couldn't name them. I wave at them, they smile, they wave back at me. They're all quite remarkable in their friendliness, truly and genuinely happy to see me, and I'm so pleased to acknowledge their warmth and return their greetings. Hello, hello, hello! On and on I go, and for the first time ever in my entire life, I know that I belong. This is a good place, a safe place. This is that demi, if surburban, Eden.

When I woke up, I had, without quite realising it, tears in my eyes. And I tried to explain to my partner of that time why I was upset and what I had experienced. But I couldn't make her understand what I was talking about.

Why ever would I feel that I didn't belong?

11.

When Garth Ennis wrote his updating of Dan Dare in 2008, he obviously set out deliberately to make a statement about what was great about England and Great Britain. That's quite appropriate, given that the original strip was in its own way doing the same thing. The six chapters by Mr Ennis and artist Gary Erskine constitue, however, a far far more fiercely political book than anything Frank Hampton would ever have considered. This new approach to the Dan Dare mythos is such a bravely individual take on what is and what isn't a laudable characteristic of nationhood, that it took some readers unaware. Perhaps they'd never noticed that Dan Dare's Englishness was nearly always a different beast from that which has passed as English too often in the past. Perhaps they never saw the politics implicit in Dan's world being so similar, and yet sometimes subtly different, from the culture around him.


Mr Ennis is a well-known student of World War II, and I suspect that his studies might have led him to formulate his views on what was admirable about the British character in the era before Dan Dare's creation. His is a passionate respect for the bravery and skill of so many of the British soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians who came under under fire in the past. And to Mr Ennis, as is obvious from his war-story work, that means a common respect for English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish men and women. Though he recognises national differences in his work, such as between, say, a man of Northern Ireland and a man of England, Ennis is entirely focused on respecting the common struggle that the peoples of Britain undertook, and the common virtues and values which carried them through. In particular, he seems to recognise and respect a now-untypical willingness to sacrifice on their part, to sacrifice their wellbeing, their health, their liberty and if necessary their lives. This is in no way a simple reflection of the old English mythology, of the myths of sturdy yeoman and obedient if lippy Jolly Jack Tarrs, because Mr Ennis is swift to show how often those not in positions of power are betrayed by some of those who are, betrayed by stupidity, snobbery, corruption and indolence. But it is, for comic books, a new way of coming to grips to what we were and what we are now. The past is to him in no way an entirely wretched state of patriachal, economic, gender and social subjugation. And neither is a world of established order and privilage deservedly ruling the lower orders.

And it's Dan Dare, good old Dan, of course, who lends his stoical and friendly example in Mr Ennis and Mr Erskine's work to illustrate a way forwards, taking behaviour once typical in the often despised past, and using it to throw our present into a much less credible light than it's usually cast. If Mr Cornell's Britain is a place of some promise, Mr Ennis's future Britain is a moral wreck thundering downwards, despite economic prosperity, from moral to actual collapse. There is such a loathing, both visceral and intellectual at the very same time, for modern-day political cowardice, for spin, for bureaucratic self-advantage, for plain and simple lies, on show here that the pages fairly shiver and crack with anger. And one thing that contributes to making Ennis's anger so moving as well as righteous is that it is actually an old anger too, an anger which both Orwell and Churchill, Low and Waugh, might to one degree or another share with him. The anger of good men and women being betrayed by a state cloaked in its own declared virtuousness.

But if there's anger underlying every word of this story, there's also a refusal to countenance defeatism and apathy. As Mr Ennis's has Professor Peasbody say: "God knows we've enough in our history to be ashamed of. But it doesn't matter if you lie about like the right, or wallow in the guilt of it like the left. Eventually you make the past a place that people can't be bothered with. And then the nation's heart rots out, because the good we've done evaporates with the bad."

Or: it's time to take the best of the past, dump the worst of the present, and use whatever's left to get stuck into the future

And I think of Dan Dare in this story, and of the fatal sacrifices willingly embraced by his old comrade Digsby and his new protegee Sub-Lieutenant Christian. I think of Captain Britain, and Frank Hampson's Interplanet Space Fleet, among so many other examples from the world of comic-books. And I find, despite my very best intentions, something almost hopeful there. (Perhaps it actually is hope I feel, but it seems I'm ashamed to admit it.) Buried underneath the laser beams and the magic swords really are challenges to traditional ways of seeing the world, engaging the reader in ways that politicians and theoreticians so very often don't.

12.


At the end of "Captain Britain And MI: 13" # 4, Dr Faiza Hussain, an Anglo-Asian woman doctor, modestly pulls the sword Excalibur from the rubble Captain Britain has half-buried it in. She's worried that the super-heroes of MI: 13 have forgotten the sword and she removes it, albeit on Merlin's secret prompting, to return it to them. And as it comes easily of the rubble in her hands, she, and the readers, immediately know that she is the new, worthy, wielder of Excalibur. It's a scene that's almost weakened by its own good intentions. We know the point that Mr Cornell is making,Of course it would be a damn good idea for the Muslim woman to wield the sword. That says is this is a good Britain, a country that embraces all of those who live and work within her borders, or as Cornell has Merlin say, a Britain that is "one thing that contains many". It's a touching, hopeful, inclusive idea, a far more positive spin than that of Garth Ennis, but no less a thoughtful one for all that.

But what finally closes the idea and caps the words is the charming last panel of the story, by artist Leonard Kirk, where Captain Britain, The Black Knight, Spitfire and Peter Wisdom surround Dr Hussain, absolutely gleaming with the joy they feel about her winning such an honour. (Of course, it's implicit that she is honouring the sword by her virtues as much as it is her by its choice to sit in her hands.) The cast of the comic are so very happy for her, and for themselves, because this is a better world now. They're relaxed in each company, two aristocrats, an American immigrant, a white Englishman and an Anglo-Asian woman. They like each other, they're more than happy to work and stand together. It's a group of folks we'd like to know ourselves, and be respected by. They'd be good folks to live and work with.

13.


Professor Peabody's manifesto, in Ennis's Dan Dare, is a simple one. Once a member of the government that led the nation straight into war with the Mekon, she's going to turn away from political "realism" and spin. She's going to stand for: "The Truth. Honour. Simple decency. All the things we've learned to sneer at. I'm going to be honest with people."

14.

Myths are mysterious things. They can begin to seduce you even as you dissect them for their meaning, their antecedents, their artistry, their contradictions and flaws. You can pin a myth down, thinking you're going to cut it up and understand it and emasculate it.

But you really can't.




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