As I understand it, he still had family over here and he certainly knew the country well enough to casually reference geographical details which make me suspect he was pretty familiar with West London, at least.  It never sounded conspicuously 'foreign' to me under Claremont, although in any case, any glaring errors would have been corrected by the London editor before it went to print.  Herb Trimpe's art, on the other hand, is very definitely Britain through the eyes of an American; I gather part of the reason he was given the assignment was because he'd spent some time here, but since the Captain Britain strip was mostly based around London and Trimpe had apparently stayed in Cornwall, I doubt it helped much. Alan Moore, in an article on the subject a few years later, described London as drawn by Americans as inevitably resembling "either modern day Chicago or beautiful downtown Bulgaria around the turn of the century", or something similar, and he wasn't far off in Trimpe's case.

So, does Captain Britain take on Typhoon and Spitfire, as well, for a full on Battle of Britain? Or am I the only one who makes the connection to this:



or this:

Let's have them all team-up with Frank Hampson-era Dan Dare too!

Captain Britain #5 (Nov '76)

Script: Chris Claremont
Art: Herb Trimpe/Fred Kida

"Captain Britain Has Been Beaten!"



Issue five picks up our tale with the Captain regaining consciousness surrounded by bystanders from Thames University, just in time for one of the buildings damaged by Hurricane to collapse; so, rather than take off after the villain, he finds himself helping Courtney, Jacko and various others to dig people out of the rubble, "the living--and the dead" (yes, innocent bystanders actually die in British comics; I suspect that in an American Marvel title in '76, all the damaged buildings would have been conveniently empty). Jacko Tanner is still sniping at Brian Braddock, despite Braddock being nowhere in sight, which suggests that he has some deep rooted obsession with him, but CB's ego gets a bit of a boost when Dai Thomas turns up with his subordinate, Inspector Kate Fraser, and starts ranting about "super powered yobbos" turning London into their "private punching ground": Brian's tutor, Dr. Neil MacKenzie,mounts a spirited defence of our hero and tells Thomas he thinks he's attacking the wrong man. CB slips away while they're arguing, his departure noticed only by Kate Fraser, who says nothing.
Fraser, incidentally, is another character last seen in that same Blade series in which Thomas made his debut. She's another character who will basically fade into the background pretty quickly here, and while in her original appearances she had some sort of psychic ability, it's never mentioned in this series, possibly because Claremont has plans to introduce a female psychic of his own in the near future. Or maybe he just forgot.

Meanwhile, a throwaway character already introduced is about to make his second and in all probability last appearance, but it is a significant one. Sandy York (remember him?) is an amateur potographer, and he tried to photograph Hurricane, hoping to sell the pictures to "The Mail or The Mirror", but is baffled to find that every one of them is fogged. Brian's genius intellect immediately leads him to deduce that Hurricane's armour is nuclear powered; "that glow surrounding him--that's from an intense concentration of radioactivity affecting the photographic negative". This gives Brian an idea...

We cut to some hours later at Brian's flat in Seraph Mews, which we've never seen before, and which he apparently rents from Dr. MacKenzie because it gives him access to MacKenzie's private lab. With a speed which even Tony Stark would envy, Brian pinpoints the exact type of radiation Hurricane is emitting by examining bits of the buildings he touched, and whips up a tracking device which will lead him straight to him. He also establishes that Hurricane's gear is unstable, he is "a walking H bomb", and if he goes off "it's bye-bye London"!

Hurricane has returned to his lair, where he muses on what part of London to destroy next before demanding a ransom of "a billion pounds in gold", but before he can choose he is rudely interrupted by our hero, who bursts in through a skylight and announces that he is there "to end your madness once and for all--or die trying!"

That didn't work out too well last time, of course. Still, maybe Brian's due for a change of luck...though I'm actually wondering why, if Hurricane's armour is so radioactive, he doesn't just sit back and wait for the guy to drop dead. What do you mean, "that's not very heroic"?

Captain Britain #6 (Nov '76)

Script: Chris Claremont
Art: Herb Trimpe/Fred Kida

"Havoc at Heathrow"



OK, there's really not a great deal to say about this issue, as all we basically get is a protracted fight scene between Captain Britain (who still doesn't seem to know what he's doing, and at one point even sabotages himself by carelessly dropping his quarterstaff and then can't find an opportunity to recover it) and Hurricane, who appears to have him totally outclassed. The Captain does discover that his foe's weak point is the cooling unit in his backpack, but he can't get close enough to him to do anything about it. Eventually, having narrowly failed to drop a jumbo jet on CB, Hurricane manages to knock him out again by sucking all the air out of his lungs with a wind tunnel, and our hero awakens to find himself chained over the air intake of a Concorde. Hurricane has been waiting for him to wake up, and now intends to turn the engine on at full throttle: the Captain will be sucked into the engine, and become mincemeat...

I think Hurricane has been watching too many old movie serials, personally. Why didn't he just kill him while he was out cold?

Oh yes, one piece of trivia: the cover image of this issue was used on one of the earliest and now rarest pieces of Captain Britain related merchandise: a 180 piece jigsaw puzzle, released in 1977.

Captain Britain #7 (Nov '76)

Script: Chris Claremont
Art: Herb Trimpe/Fred Kida

"Wind of Death"



The Hurricane saga finally concludes after four issues, and better yet, we finally find out who our windy villain is and why he's doing what he's doing, as-in a move straight out of the Superhero Handbook-CB staves off his impending doom by inviting Hurricane to "at least tell me the reason--! You obviously have genius! Why use it criminally?" Naturally, there isn't a supervillain alive who can resist that line, so the Captain's predicament is sidelined for a bit as we go into a flashback of Albert Potter, a meteorologist employed by the London Weather Research Centre, who is attempting to "tame the big wind". A noble goal no doubt, but poor Bert has wasted ten million quid in trying and failing, we are told, and his lousy attitude doesn't excatly endear him to his co-workers, either (lines like "He who controls the weather will control the world" can't fail to be a little worrying for those having to work with him, one feels). Inevitably, Bert's project is cancelled, but the Director doesn't know that Bert has completed his "experimental weather control craft", which he foolishly flies into the heart of a Hurricane, thinking he can destroy it. He can't...

His craft destroyed by repeated lightning strikes and powerful winds, Bert somehow survives a four thousand metre fall into the ocean and drifts for two days before being rescued by a passing ship. The only visible sign of his ordeal is total hair loss (why? Who knows) but Bert, who wasn't exactly playing with a full deck to start with, is now completely unhinged and believes his misfortune to have been caused by the deliberate sabotage of his craft by some cworker jealous of his brilliance. "All mankind was guilty--guilty of ridicule and scorn--and now that the hurricane had changed me--had made me one with itself--I had the power to exact my vengeance!" This, he did-by "hiding from my unsuspecting enemies" while building his super suit, and then embarking on his ever so slightly silly blackmail scheme (one suspects that in the meantime, Bert's "unsuspecting enemies" back at the centre have probably forgotten all about him). It's rather vague at this point whether Bert has actually gained powers from the storm which the suit is somehow regulating, or if his abilities come from the suit, and he's just developed some sort of god complex.

Either way, his monologue has given our hero a chance: as Hurricane starts up the engine, te Captain manages to free a hand, and uses it to rub his magic amulet, reasoning that "the chains are set to hold Captain Brtain, not Brian Braddock." The shackles holdig him fall straight off Brian, who is "slimmer as a non superhero", and he (somehow) swings himself out of the jet intake before it can suck him in, before resuming his super form. Deducing that Hurricane has indeed somehow internalized the power of the hurricane, CB then works out that it's his backpack that's regulating that power, cooling "the tremendous heat generating within him". Engaging the bad guy again, the Captain at first can't get near him, but then figures out how to use his previous defeats to his advantage: he pretends to pass out again, luring the villain to him, then slips his staff under the straps of Hurricane's backpack and levers it off him. Seconds later, the villain collapses: "Deprived of a cooling system for drawing off his tremendous body heat--Hurricane literally burned himself out!" The clear implication is that Hurricane is dead, like the Reaver before him, though well over a decade later he would be revived having supposedly spent years incarcerated at "Darkmoor Prison" in the 90s series Gene Dogs, and would later battle the Fantastic Four after for some reason moving to America (see below).



Captain Britain ends the issue by musing, as the airport security staff run onto the scene, "poor, hapless Albert Potter! He had so much genius! He could have done so much to help mankind...but instead he chose to throw it all away".