1085 ( )

The guy at the shop was shocked he actually had this in stock. I'm not. It's a ton of fun, and refreshing to see an epic superhero throwdown going on somewhere that isn't big city America. The characters are fresh for me, too, which was a treat.

I may have a ridiculous thing for Pete Wisdom now... ( )

Certainly pacey and with a good mix of laughs and passion, this ultimately suffers as a standalone graphic story only because by necessity it had to reinvent a character whilst tying into a comic book "event".
Avalon (or similar by another name) has certainly been done better elsewhere, and whilst it was never going to be easy to make the Skrull particularly complex characters, the Christian mythology is writ somewhat heavy handedly. Brand new character Faiza Hussain is very well written though, and the denouement sets up what could have been a great series.
So most of what's good about Captain Britain and MI:13: Secret Invasion you can lay at Cornell's door, and most of what's bad you can lay at Marvel's & his predecessor's. ( )

My second-favorite Doctor Who writer returns to Marvel Comics with this, the first volume of his new ongoing. He easily and adeptly demonstrates what makes so good, by turning in a cracking good invasion story that manages to tell us what it means to be British and what it means to be a hero at the same time. Probably because they're pretty much the same thing. Cornell is a wizard at comic writing; this book is filled with moments where you turn the page and a shiver goes down your spine because what's happened is just so dang cool. I'm a little disgruntled about the fate of one character, but the sheer awesome contained in the rest of this book makes up for that. I look forward to the many collections to come as much as I mourn the fact that the series was canceled just as I began it. (This volume also contains an entirely forgettable backup story, a reprint of two 1970s issues of Marvel Team-Up where Captain Britain meets Spider-Man. They fight a guy who tries to kill them by putting them in a gigantic underground pinball machine. Um...)