Ron Wilson (2)

This collection is a bit of a mixed bag.

It starts with two story arcs from the Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain Weekly anthology title which were ok, but nothing special.

Then has a fantastic two-part Marvel Team-Up story by Chris Claremont and John Byrne where Captain Britain actually teams up with Spider-Man (as opposed to just sharing title duties on a book) and they face off against Arcade in his first appearance ever. It's amazing seeing how many of the classic Arcade story beats show more and iconic character points are present right from this first story.

Then, finally, we move to Hulk Comic (another anthology title) and its Black Knight stories because, after the cancellation of Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain Weekly, CB was not seen as a viable or interesting character. But editor Dez Skin, writer Steve Parkhouse and artists Paul Neary and John Stokes wanted to give CB another shot so reintroduced him as a side character in the Black Knight series. They grounded the character further into Arthurian legend and successfully set him up for the upcoming seminal run by Alan Moore and Alan Davis and the introduction of the Marvel-616 designation for the main Marvel universe as part of the Jasper Warp storyline (coming up in volume 4).

Overall, worth the read for the Arcade story in the middle and the Captain Britain backstory which helps setup the best X-book ever: Excalibur! show less

Well, this was an utterly dreadful waste of time.

While I appreciate that Byrne tried to do something different than expected, when he failed, he failed hard.

Rocky Grimm, Space Ranger is terrible. Ron Wilson's art was the basic B-level stuff that the second tier titles had to deal with.

Not good.

Pretty much the same as volume 1 except in Black & White (I guess it wasn't doing well enough to keep paying a colourist). So ridiculous and so 70's.