Paul Cornell wrote a mini-series a few years ago about Captain Britain and a group of other British superheroes - my Young Man lent it to me, and it is awesome!
And right at the beginning, in the middle of a Skrull invasion, he creates a new female superhero - and he does it brilliantly. Dr Faiza Hussain is in the middle of the battlefield (around the Houses of Parliament), doing her job, when she's zapped by a Skrull weapon and wakes up with the ability to heal down to the sub-atomic level.
I love the way that the British Marvel superheroes have a strong connection to magic and the Arthurian myth. After all, King Arthur was the superhero of his day. And I also love the fact that, when Excalibur turns up - which it really has to do in a story about saving Britain from alien invaders - Captain Britain wields it for a bit, but it's not meant for him, and it's the Muslim woman from Essex who pulls the sword from the stone this time!
Paul Cornell is very good at characterisation, and though I'd never heard of most of the characters in the comic before, I quickly discovered everything I needed to know about them and what they were like. So that would be about everybody except Captain Britain, who I know about because my Young Man lent me the comics with his origin story - Black Knight, Spitfire, Pete Wisdom, John the Skrull, and Captain Midlands, who I like because he's a bit rubbish really. Black Knight gets a rather sweet romantic sub-plot with Faiza, too, right from the moment when she first meets him as a hero-worshipping fan.
And then the vampires arrive, and so does Blade, and Captain Britain's wife Meggan, and there are mad things like Dracula's castle on the moon, and has Spitfire really turned to the Dark Side (and why is her son Ken wearing that ridiculous costume)? And it's all a lot of fun.
So now I've got to find out where I can get more comics like this!
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