Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain #5 // Review
Morgan Le Fay has hooked up with Doctor Doom. Powerful magics unite, threatening England. Betsy has a few ideas as to how to save the nation. She’s got friends all over the multiverse. With the right planning, she just might get everything to come out alright in Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain #5. Writer Tini Howard brings her plot to a climax in an issue drawn by Vasco Georgiev and Erick Arciniega. Howard mixes superhero action with a classic heist narrative energy for an enjoyable adventure with a lot of elements rolling around the periphery of a large ensemble.
Jaime Braddock has been kind of a mess. He’s been a scattered hell of a human being. There’s a Captain Britain in his pocket dimension. He seems to have the upper hand in a realm of madness. Rachel takes pity on the madman. Can he really be trusted? Meanwhile, Betsy is formulating a plan. There are a lot of moving parts. There’s great risk and potential danger, but there isn’t much that can be done about that. So much can go wrong...and she IS up against a pair of the more formidable practitioners of dark magic in the Marvel Universe. There are no guarantees.
Howard moves the plot through a hell of a lot of different angles. Any story featuring as many different elements as Howard is dealing with is bound to feel a little scattered. This wouldn’t be bad if there was some sort of central energy about the story that thrived on chaos. The big villains that Betsy’s dealing with are far from being the scattered madness that would fit the patchwork nature of Howard’s overall plot. Thankfully, the central energy that Howard is working with for Betsy’s plan IS well-executed, keeping things together quite well at the center of the issue’s plot.
Georgiev and Arciniega occasionally go for moody-dramatic art. Shadows cover the corners of everything, and there’s a foreboding sense of darkness that seems to move through it all. Georgiev and Arciniega do manage to find the emotions at the center of the interpersonal drama when it reaches the page. Betsy remains a strong, appealing character even as the issue seems so intent on focusing on EVERY other character in a very large ensemble. On the whole, though, Howard isn’t giving the art team nearly enough visual novelty to explore the fantastic in a world of magic that really should feel more wondrous.
Betsy is an appealing enough character that she really deserves a bit more of a central focus. Howard is trying to give her extended cast a bit too much of the plot. The inner struggles of Betsy should rest more or less at the center of the book, but she’s not allowed nearly enough time on the page to develop into anything more than the leader of a team. It’s cool to see her in charge, but there should be more of a focus on her and who she is in the center of her own book.
