Marvel UK was always its own animal, as they were allowed to create their own characters and thrive within the Marvel Universe. As a Transformers nerd, I am mostly familiar with this due to Marvel’s Transformers comics, wherein the UK team worked within the cracks of the American G1 stories to craft their own tales with characters the yanks weren’t using – and eventually, they took over the U.S. series and actually made it interesting. I’m less familiar with the 1990s work, but that’s what is being revived in Revolutionary War: Alpha, from writers Andy Lanning and Alan Cowsill, with artist Richard Elson.
If you’re not familiar with these characters, you’ll be in the same boat I was when picking this up – intrigued, but a bit bewildered, because it seems to pick up from wherever it was that the ’90s stories stopped. It’s very heavy on plot and, while it shovels a lot of characters at us, it doesn’t give the uninitiated all that much to go on. Then again, the Revolutionary War series isn’t so much stand-alone as it is cycling through a lot of these characters (coming up, we’ve got RW: Dark Angel, RW: Knights of Pendragon, RW: Death’s Head, RW: Supersoldiers, RW: Motormouth and RW: Warheads before this all comes to a close), so maybe they’ll take their time focusing on just who we’re dealing with. Also, it seems that Dark Angel (not Jessica Alba) is going to appear in a Kieron Gillen Iron Man arc before too much longer (just as he recently used Death’s Head, who looks markedly different from the Death’s Head that shows up in this issue, so one of them must be Death’s Head II, I guess, and hopefully that whole thing will be re-explained soon), so the profile may be raised there as well.
Anyway, the story opens with Captain Britain and Pete Wisdom of MI-13 fighting the psycho-wraiths of an evil organization/corporation called Mys-Tech. Soon after, it turns out that SHIELD also has a Europe Division and they’re working on tracking the goings-on with Mys-Tech, which was thought to be dead and gone. Even Nick Fury Jr. is on the scene, since Mys-Tech was once a cabal of techno-wizards who sold their souls to Mephisto for immortality, and they eventually became a big corporation in the business of, among other things, creating superhumans, and decided they wanted to be free of their obligation to provide Mephisto with souls – and to do that, they tried to kill the whole of Great Britain. Here’s where we learn of characters like Killpower (That’s So ’90s), Colonel Liger and the Warheads (solid band name), and how mercenaries like Death’s Head and Black Axe (coming to a pro wrestling event in a gymnasium near you) even pitched in to beat Mys-Tech and banish them to Hell. But now they’re rising again.
So while Pete Wisdom and one Agent Keller set about recovering Colonel Tigon Liger (that’s his actual name) from hilarious itinerant alcoholism that almost gets him burned alive by sociopathic teenagers in order to reunite him with his Giant ’90s Gun that’s also sentient and named Clementine, Captain Britain heads out to see about bringing in Dark Angel (That’s So Raven) of Darkmoor Castle only to find her in the midst of some kind of magical electrocution. Suddenly, Cap is attacked by his “deadliest enemies,” which include Slaymaster (Killpower! Bloodsword! Airstryke!), The Fury, Saturnyne and Jaspers… but it turns out to be Death’s Head using an image inducer. The real deal, as you can see on the cover above, is a hulking robot guy with a skull-ish face and a lions mane for some reason – again, not exactly the cool 30-foot robo-merc we saw in Gillen’s Iron Man, but hulking robot enough, yes?
As you might discern, this book feels peeled right out of the 1990s, and while that’s not inherently a bad thing (some good stuff came out of that era, despite how maligned it is), names like Killpower and Slaymaster evoke the lamest ‘ain’t we edgy’ parts of it. Then again, Slaymaster is a one-panel reference and Killpower appears to have sacrificed himself to tentacled werido hell demons, so they may not hang around so much to be constant reminders of outdated naming conventions. Also, if Lanning & Cowsill are trying to resuscitate these characters, they might go through some changes by the time this all shakes out. Then again, given how tamely Wisdom is written here (which admittedly is comparing him to how abrasively Si Spurrier recently wrote him in X-Men Legacy, so it might not be entirely fair), we can’t bank on that. Elson’s artwork would feel modern enough if he didn’t have to draw all those headwraps.
Revolutionary War could turn out to be an interesting revival of a slew of characters that could have been relegated to a bygone era, or it could just turn out to be a short-lived reunion party for the old guard that doesn’t mean they’ll be back on regular duty anytime soon. Either way, it’ll serve as an interesting window into what many of today’s British creators probably grew up on.
