1083 ( )

A really fun and mind bending story with a delightfully sweet ending. ( )

Huh. Well that was disappointing.
First I was confused, so many characters and I didn't really know any of them (except Blade and that's only from the films). And we don't spend enough time with them to learn anything about them. The focus is all on the vampires.
So, I paused and read the wiki page on Captain Britain (which at least explained why there appeared to be two of them).
Then everything kicked off and it got quite exciting, except we stop mid action for a mind numbingly boring issue on Meggan (Cap Britain's formerly dead (?) wife) and something to do with hell. Which is followed by a cricket match that I found amusing for the cricket stuff but CB kept thinking of wife which dragged it down to boredom level again. Plus I couldn't work out when this match was taking place, did they pause in the middle of a vampire invasion to play cricket? I don't think so but who knows, not me!

Favourite characters: the crusader and the Muslim - Dane, The Black Knight, and Dr Faiza Hussain, his steward. Pleased to see a positive portrayal of a British Muslim woman in a hijab. ( )

Paul Cornell’s British superteam face an invasion from Dracula himself and his vampire army. Cornell provides a distinctively modern British take on the superhero genre with plenty of little cultural nods, including a game of cricket. Tremendously entertaining, despite what might be seen as a narrative cheat in the middle of the story. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1435061.html

I found this quite difficult to get into. I'm not familiar with Captain Britain as a character, and the two-paragraph synopsis was not sufficient for me to get the characters sorted out in my mind. So I spent some time wondering who I was meant to care about in the story. (And who was the rather cute woman who apparently gets torn in half on page 31, never to be mentioned again?)

Apart from that (fairly major) gripe, I did like the two main elements of the plot - the story of Captain Britain and his friends using cunning subterfuge to defeat a planned invasion of vampires from space led by Dracula, and the escape of our hero's wife from Hell. Also I fundamentally approve of Cornell's rewriting of Britishness as an inclusive project - here the vampires are the bigots obsessed with religious purity. And the artwork is rather gorgeous. ( )