Comic Book Review Captain Britain Five Tickets to Terror
Among the worst comic book creations ever.
COMIC BOOK REVIEW – CAPTAIN BRITAIN FIVE TICKETS TO TERROR. 1977 – Reprinted in 2009. Marvel.
Captain Britain is a badly conceived and contrived cousin to the much more successful Captain America – a stiff upper lip, British hero, bearing a British Lion logo on his red spandex and wearing a Union Jack mask that makes him look as if he is about to rob a bank. He flies, and carries a sceptre hat seems able to smash through most obstacles, and he can generate small force fields.
Captain Britain is a physics student called Brian Braddock in his human guise, though in most adventures we don’t see him unmasked or out of his heroic mode of being.
In Five Tickets, the Captain is one of five people unlucky enough to receive a ticket to a free tropical island holiday. The tickets arrive from an anonymous benefactor and the five people, Braddock, an actress, an ageing wartime officer, a gangster and an athlete, rather naively take up on the invite.
They fail to notice that a robot pilots their plane. This is not an android that looks and behaves human, but a clanking great metal hulk of a thing, and the pilot is in full view of the passengers throughout the flight.
The plane crashes, trapping the five on the island and it dawns on them that their dream come true holiday from out of the blue is really a sinister trap. The island is full of monsters, mutants, volcanoes and quicksand. The Captain is run ragged for several comics rescuing his fellow passengers from various dangers as they blunder from one confrontation with menace to another. There is little plot development – just an endless sprawling series of confrontations.
We get to know nothing of the other four passengers, as the Captain rescues them and they get to admire his prowess and bravery as he battles to save them.
After a while, the villain the behind al this reveals himself to be a Dr. Claw, a crippled, embittered man who was infected by chemical agents in a British laboratory experiment. He is out for revenge for being left so disfigured, and he starts his campaign for vengeance by trying to take down the good Captain. The five passengers are subjected to a Dr. Cyclops style shrinking ray and then spend several comic strips and chapters running from and fighting ordinary sized cats, ants, etc, before the writers, Jim Lawrence & Larry Leiber, tire of this and have them grow spontaneously big gain, before fighting the twisted Doctor and his chief henchman, Fong, in a gladiatorial arena.
The Captain eventually captures Claw’s private and the five fly off for home, leaving Claw facing a lava flow and his own vengeful mutants (in a Wellsian Dr. Moreau style). At the end of the day, Britain seems to be the kind of hero who beats up a wheelchair bound man with extreme disabilities and leave him on an island full of monsters. It seems to be the British thing to do.
A naff comic strip with a badly composited hero – hardly Marvel or Britain’s finest hour.
Arthur Chappell
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