The truly gonzo material unfortunately runs out leaving us with stories that are simply very bad (mostly by Larry Lieber) but ropey plots aside this is an attempt to do a Captain Britain that owes something to the Avengers TV show and James Bond - a British take within the Marvel formula. Eventually it declines into an X-men 'riff' on intolerance as the logic of Moore's world is explored to its natural limits.

Delano's biggest contribution would really end up being the bringing of Betsy Braddock into prominence—a character which would eventually become the immensely popular X-men character known as Psylocke under the guidance of Chris Claremont. After reading 1300+ pages of this monstrously exhaustive omnibus - almost every scrap of Brian Braddock material is here, from the heights of Alan Moore's most straightforward superhero run to the depths of Larry Lieber's most generic one - is it time for me to reverse that cruel adolescent judgement? So all in all a huge book of varying quality but the strength of Davis' stories makes this so worth having, and deserving of 4 stars. For each, this is their first masterpiece, a fitting repository of the literary and artistic standards they would establish. After Moore, the quality stays strong with Davis writing as well as drawing, before Delano comes in and takes us to the end of the Captain's run as a solo story.Jamie Delano tries to make keep things interesting, even using threads left by Moore's run, but ultimately comes up with 14 issues of just okay comics. As is so often the case in these exhaustive omnibus collections, you have to wade through a lot of mediocrity to get to the gems. Now, thrill to a complete collection of Captain Britain’s iconic UK adventures - from questing alongside the Black Knight to battling Jim Jaspers and the Fury to prevent Earth from becoming a crooked world! The final two entries have Chris Claremont (Captain Britain's creator) giving Captain Britain a role in exploring the X-juniors' 'teenage angst' in creditable stories whose main purpose seems to be transfer Braddock's sister to the New Mutants story line as Psylocke. Both Alan Davis' Forward and Jim Krueger's Afterwards and Afterwords contain the same cryptic 'Edited for Content' which may or may not be relevant.

Within these issues, Alan Moore introduces a multitude of concepts, such as giving the Marvel universe the designate Earth-616, multi-versal variants of characters—the idea of Captain Britains being protectors of the “Omni-verse”, reality-warping mutants, the fury, to name a few. The 10-year British publication of Captain Britain ends with a thoughtful issue resolving one of the book's longest-running subplots, the pointless feud between the Captain and Inspector Dai Thomas. This omnibus lives up to its name with over 1300 pages of Captain Britain material from his first appearance through his various British serials onto an X-Men Annual in 1987. For everything that comes before about page 700, and everything after page 100 or so, doesn't actually exist. This was an adventure from the early 80's after they revived the character and gave him a new uniform, and dispensed with his 6 foot staff.I had the old omnibus for years but it missed a lot of material; this one is far better and much more convenient. The Alan Moore and Alan Davis penned stories are the aforementioned gems, the rest ranges from decent to dear-God-let-this-end-already. For one thing, the terrible story wherein CB goes to an island with a bunch of people because they all won a "contest" set up by some lame, forgettable villain.

Recent projects include the dark fantasy novel Dragon Moon and Sovereign SevenTM, a comic book series published by DC Comics. Thorpe's story lines from the 1981 re-boot begin the Omnibus which could be seen a mash-up between Valiant, Marvel and 2000AD [founded in 1977] in style (very British). But it's the weakest of his early hits, even so: unlike Miracleman or V or Swamp Thing or Halo Jones there's no thematic depth or sense of a story with a point to it. He has also written a novel, Voice of the Fire, and performs "workings" (one-off performance art/spoken word pieces) with The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, some of which have been released on CD. But the core story line stands and could even have future legs under a serious creative hand who could escape the 'woke'.The whimsy and fantasy of his 20th Century appearances probably should be seen, at least partly, as a way to avoid crossing those lines. The 80's Psylocke, deceptively weak in her lavender gossamer, had an immense amount of potential, and I yet mourn her transformation into a thong-wearing ninja.