Paul Cornell On Captain Britain Of Christmas Past!

Written by Ian Cullen on December 23, 2009 – 11:00 am -

Its been an interesting 2 – years for me in covering comics on SciFiPulse, and in part the one book that renewed my interest in the comic book genre was Paul Cornell and his very British adaptation of Captain Britain. Sadly the comic was discontinued after 15 issues. But the teaming of Cornell, Artist Leonard Kirk and editor Nick Lowe.

Back in 2008 Cornell was interviewed by Matt Badham as research for an article he was doing on the history of Captain Britain. Elements of the interview wound up in Judge Dredd Magazine and Tripwire, but the complete interview, which has never saw the light of day has finally arrived at downthetubes.net and SciFiPulse has been given special permission to print a couple of excerpts from the interview, which provides some fascinating insights about Paul Cornell and his approach for Captain Britain.

One of the many things that made Cornell’s Captain Britain so brilliant was the team that he worked with on the book, and Cornell has always given a great deal of credit to his collaborators on Captain Britain and was more than happy to talk about how the teaming of Cornell, Kirk and Lowe worked.

Paul Cornell: Hugely. Three people run the book really. Me, Leonard and Nick Lowe, the Editor. We have these demented plotting sessions and conversations. It’s a great way to do things, because we can change things between us. Not like a TV show where you’ve got layer upon layer of people to check stuff with. Nick has really been a powerful force in terms of plotting, in terms of shaping where we’re going. And that’s great. We form a plotting unit.

“Leonard is a great artist; he’s got fantastic, what they call acting in comics, he can create terrific drama through expressions. It means that I can pull back from descriptive dialogue. He will re-plot a page if he has something better in mind and we now know each other well enough that I can just let him because his version is always better.

“When I had a Blade versus Spitfire fight scene page to write, I thought that there was no point at all in me writing a silent fight scene for the page, so I just asked Leonard to have them fight. He knew what both characters wanted and he knew where they were going to end up, and then the next page is back on script. What I said to him was, ‘You choreograph that.’ What he provided was a page composed of 16 panels. Now I would never have given an artist that, because that would be seen as insanely demanding, but it’s a great scene! And this is the level of trust that’s developed between us. It’s lovely.”

Of course as with all things creative and fun. Captain Britain was cut short after 15 issues, and Cornell would be the first to admit that he was sorry to stop working on the book, and has always admitted that he had a lot more story ideas for the characters.

However. He is also happy to talk about ideas that never got the green light on the book, and one such idea was a meeting between Conservative Party Leader David Cameron with Dracula as part of the Vampire Nation story arc that ended Captain Britain and MI13’s run.

Paul Cornell: I was going to treat him nicely. Basically, he was going to be meeting with Dracula, who was going to say, ‘If you do this small thing for me, then I will use my influence in Britain to get you elected.’ And we’d have Cameron going to him, ‘Yes, yes, I will think about your proposal. That sounds great.’ And then going home and immediately calling MI-13. But the lawyers said that even for a couple of pages the hint that a real figure might be doing something bad wasn’t allowable.

The only way that we could have Gordon Brown in there [in an early issue] was that he was being thoroughly heroic. That applies to the use of all real figures in Marvel really.

You can read the whole of this brilliant interview with Paul Cornell about Captain Britain here at downthetubes.net

Related posts:

  1. Captain Britain Put Back On The Rack
  2. Captain Britain and MI-13 Scores Three
  3. Captain Britain Sells Out Again!
  4. Comic Book Signing: Paul Cornell – Dark X-Men & Black Widow
  5. Ltd – Edition – Comix Store To Play Host To Paul Cornell

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