British Comics (and British Superheroes)
The characters this page leads to show the development of British comic book superheroes over the years. Some were serious attempts at superheroes, some were more frivolous or outright spoofs. With the advent of 2000 A.D. and with Marvel UK beginning to produce their own characters, there seems to have been a drop off in home-grown heroes elsewhere, as creators used those two outlets to showcase their characters more.
Most of the characters below are seriously under-represented on the net, and hence I have little information on some of them. Yet their influence is undeniable - two of the recognised masters of the superhero genre have utilised versions of these characters in their own work - Alan Moore not only revived Marvelman, but also had the Fury slaughter many of the heroes covered in his Captain Britain strip. Similarly Grant Morrison revived a lot of them in his Zenith series (and then slaughtered them - I see a pattern developing). Moore has recently been tied to a new project, Albion, which will revive some of them as a D.C. Comics mini-series.
I've split the list into smaller sections. For brevity's sake I've not included the slew of cops, detectives, soldiers, footballers(!), spies etc, who, while heroic, are nonetheless regular humans. And I've also missed out most of the Tarzan-wannabees, unless they have a genuine superpower or they travelled to civilisation to employ their heightened skills - there are so many jungle boys and girls that you've got to wonder about the type of parent who abandons small children in the wilderness. I might get round to including them at a later date (but I might not).
You can browse them a number of ways. If you want to do so purely alphabetically, go to the Glossary, where they are listed among all the other characters from across the world. Otherwise you can browse by:
The fact that a handful of companies owned several comics could also make life very confusing - not only do some strips move from comic to comic, as one title cancelled and was merged with another, but you could also have the company raid their vaults for old material to rehash years later - sometimes by reviving an old strip and sometimes by reprinting an old strip but renaming all the characters (and in some case redrawing them). This can create some mindbending problems when trying to catalogue characters - what counts as a new character, what is a continuation, and what is merely a reprint? See here for notes on these relationships.
Further details on a number of the characters in the following pages can be found at the excellent Toonhound's Fleetway Street site.
All images and characters depicted are copyright their respective holders, and are used above for informational purposes only. No infringement is intended and copyrights remain at source.