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Showing posts with label Gary Friedrich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gary Friedrich. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

CAPTAIN BRITAIN PART THREE -
THE LIEBER YEARS LIMP TO AN END

One positive thing I will say about these old Captain Britain stories is that the pace is frenetic. It feels like reading a comic strip, where every storyline leads directly into the next, with no downtime in between. I assume this is due to the weekly schedule of the series. On top of that, Cap's adventures went black-and-white about halfway through the Skull storyline, which adds to the "newspaper strip" feel of the whole thing.

Case in point: Immediately following the Captain America/Red Skull storyline, Brian Braddock passes out in his bed and dreams about nutty ol' Lord Hawk, a hermit for whom Brian constructed a robotic bird some time back.  To keep him company. A. Robotic. Bird.

Anyway, at precisely that moment, Lord Hawk has decided to take his bird out and terrorize England because things aren't how they used to be.  If I recall correclty, he wanted to return to a simpler time, when men and their robot birds lived off the land, and all those pesky modern conveniences weren't around to get in their way.

Monday, August 26, 2013

CAPTAIN BRITAIN PART TWO -
CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE RED SKULL

Before leaving CAPTAIN BRITAIN WEEKLY, Chris Claremont gave our hero an origin, introduced an antagonist on the police force, a mysterious criminal mastermind, and provided a good-sized, if somewhat derivative, supporting cast. Even with his departure, he had left a status quo in place and ready to use for the next writer. So naturally, pretty much all of it was junked immediately.

Art by Herb Trimpe